My mom has been really down recently because of the liver cirrhosis diagnosis (which I still insist is preliminary but which she still insists is a death sentence), and she and my dad appear to have the exact same sickness I have. We all got sick at the same time with similar symptoms, and like me, they kept getting re-sick instead of feeling better. I’m re-coughing, too. My mom took the long recovery as a sign that her immune system is shot, something else she added to her growing list of signs that she’s headed to an early grave, but I pointed out that I’m still sick, too, and I’m darn healthy otherwise. She wouldn’t let us visit for the past 2-3 weekends in a row as she and my dad are “hiding out” from any and all visitors in fear that they’d infect others with their apparent plague. Every time I’ve called her and asked if she was feeling better, the response was a very moody, “No.” She started talking last week about how she was going to die before she saw me off on my wedding since we hadn’t set a date yet. So I pulled out the big guns.
“You can’t die yet. [Mr. W] said he wants you and dad to teach the baby Chinese and that way he could learn some Chinese on the side, too.”
“What baby?”
“Oh, he wants to have a baby.”
“YOUR baby? OH!” After that it was all sunshine and rainbows and she sounded exponentially better.

Some days after that conversation, my mom lapsed into depression again over her health. In an email conversation in which she offered to help out financially with the wedding, I told her it was unnecessary as she’d paid for so much for me already in raising me and beyond. She wrote back that she wants to help pay for the wedding because it’d likely be the last thing she could help me with, what with her early grave thing and all. I wrote back, “The wedding would NOT be the last thing you’d have the opportunity to help me out with, because I’m not going to be paying you for babysitting.” She wrote back something changing the subject, so I took that as a good sign. Yesterday, walking on the Japanese Garden grounds, she made a comment about the wedding date and said something about how if she’s going to babysit, I need to get married sooner rather than later so she’d have the strength to pick up and tug around a kid. It was great to see her and my dad in such high spirits yesterday when we finally dropped them off at home at night.

I hope I’m not just in denial about her health concerns. Ideally, it’d be just an early diagnosis of liver problems that modern medicine can halt and she’d live out the rest of her natural life just fine. But I understand that to her, having watched her father waste away and die from the same disease, it’s one of the scariest things she could be diagnosed with, especially as a non-smoker and non-drinker who has no lifestyle vices to change to help her situation. She’s also concerned about my dad’s little health issues here and there (not little to her, of course), deteriorations and ailments that come with age.

Which is why I did not tell her about my surgical procedure on the 19th this month, next Wednesday. I found out that my judge is taking vacation that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, so since our courtroom will be “dark” those days, my supervisor offered me all those days off to recover from surgery. I hope to be “recovering” at Disneyland. Hey, when life gives you hot water, make tea and heal yourself, right?

Email convo between me and Moms this morning:

Mom: “Maybe was the tea, I couldn’t sleep all night!”
Me: “I couldn’t sleep last night either, but that was because I was coughing.
If I don’t get better by August, I’ll sound like this:
Judge: Do you, Cindy, take [Mr. W] to be your lawful wedded –
Cindy: *COUGH COUGH!!*
Judge: Uh, to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold –
Cindy: *COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH HACK HAAAACK!!*
Judge: Is that a no?”