Why I don't make New Year's resolutions

I don't make New Year's resolutions because I never keep them, and knowing I didn't keep a resolution makes me feel guilty, like a failure. This blog is a prime example. If I had made a resolution to blog more often, I'd be wallowing in guilt every time I got on the computer. I do want to get better about posting more often, but I'm going to look at it as something to work on, not something I have to do in order to not be a terrible person.

Anyway, I got a phone call from my dad at work last Friday. He called to tell me bad news and worse news. The merely bad news was that they tore down my childhood home last Wednesday. After my grandmother died in 2002, my dad and my aunt sold the property to a developer, so I knew it would happen at some point, but it still made me sad. More on that in a future post.

The worse news was that my uncle was in the hospital with an inoperable cancerous brain tumor. He'd been having headaches and vision problems since November, and kept putting off having an MRI. Last Friday, he became incoherent and was taken to the hospital. The doctor said he might not live until the end of this week to go to Philadelphia for an oncology consultation. My parents and I went to Dover to see him Saturday, and were (pleasantly) surprised to see him sitting in his bed, thanking us for coming to see him! It turns out that he had missed two dialysis treatments and hadn't been taking his insulin, so once all that was straightened out, he felt better. This Friday, my cousin emailed us with an update. It turns out that they now think he doesn't have cancer, but a fungal infection called zygomycosis, which often affects the eye/sinus area. He will go to Phila. sometime this week for a second opinion, but it doesn't look good. His health isn't that good to begin with, with the diabetes and kidney failure, and the information we found online said the prognosis for this thing is grave, so it's more a matter of finding out how long he has, rather than curing it. We went to see him again yesterday, and he looked OK, but we get the impression that they haven't told him how serious this condition is. He said something about dodging a bullet by not having cancer, but didn't seem too worried about the zygomycosis, so we think he doesn't know the full story yet. Maybe it's better that they wait until the other doctors examine him and they find out for sure what is going on. All the rest of us can do is wait and hope.

On top of all that, after the call from my dad, I was talking to my friend Ed at work. His partner, Wayne, is going through a depression and isn't taking care of himself. Last year, he got sick and it turned to pneumonia and he almost died. Now he's sick again, and again isn't doing anything about it, so Ed is worried that they'll have a repeat of last year. Between that and the depression, Wayne won't even get up off the couch, and Ed is at his wits' end.

Yeah, last Friday pretty much sucked.