Oh, you know. Life.

Seems like anytime some things are going well, there's got to be one incident that comes along and puts a damper on things.

Things in my family are strange right now. My aunt has been sick with the tumor in her head since the beginning of this year, but over the past few months it seemed like her condition was getting slightly better, or at least staying fairly constant. Then last week she got worse. My mom went to visit her, and was basically told that the doctors don't think she'll recover from this. Five months of heavy chemo still hasn't shrunk the mass in her brain, and it's completely destroyed the vision in her right eye. Then she is put on a feeding tube. Thursday night I went to visit her and had to try my absolute hardest to not cry in front of my family. Why? I don't know. I just can't. I can't cry in front of my mom, because I've always been the most adult of my siblings, I've always been the solid, composed one when it's come to family deaths and such events, that if I let my mom see me upset I think she'll just lose it, as if she's not emotionally jumbled enough. Then Friday morning she has to go into emergency surgery because that feeding tube apparently wasn't in her stomach, it was pumping crap into her abdomen and through her blood stream and basically gave her blood poisoning. So mind you, Friday afternoon she almost DIED from all this. My grandparents are staying at my house this weekend, and this morning my uncle calls around 5 am because my aunt started going into some kind of body shock because her blood has been so screwed up.

Obviously the main priority is my aunt's health and whether she's actually going to live at this point, but let me just say that I smell a big fat lawsuit for the hospital when all this settles.

Before I left for work today I could tell my mom was ready to lose it. I know how she gets when she's reached her wit's end, and I knew she was just on the verge of completely breaking down. It's so hard. My aunt told my mom the other day that she wasn't worried about what happened to herself, but she was terrified for her kids and she told my mom if anything happens that she needs to take care of them for her. Yeah, like that's not enough to make you want to cry. But today when I talked to my mom before work she told me that my aunt's kids are what's frightening her the most. My cousins are only 16 and 15, they were home-schooled by my aunt since they were little. They only started going to public school once my aunt got sick, so obviously this past year has been a huge, unbelievable change for them. My uncle is three years older than my grandfather, so clearly he doesn't have much time left for him, and (God forbid) if something does happen and my aunt does end up dying, what's going to happen to my cousins? Their dad is far too old to go on for much longer to raise two teenage kids, and...God. I don't know. I can't even begin to imagine what's happening. My mom said she feels like she's losing her family. If my aunt goes, then my uncle probably won't last much longer because he'll be so devastated by that. My grandfather, who got himself worried sick when my brother just had to go get his appendix taken out, just to give you a point of reference as to how worrisome he is, will probably not even be able to handle his daughter's death. He will probably make himself deathly sick over it. My grandmother, who has never showed an ounce of emotion in her entire life, will probably snap over this.

I don't know. I'm not even going to get into all these what if scenarios, but it's a frightening time. My family drives me nuts- they're big, they're loud, everyone's got to be up in everyone's business, they're melodramatic, they love causing drama and making scenes- but nevertheless they're my family and if anything happened to any of them, I don't know if I could take it. Even if I've always been the strong one, the one that always fought to keep things together during the countless moments of drama within the Meza family, I don't know if I can compete against death. I feel like that's where I'll reach my limit, and that when someone in my family does die, I'll lose that limit and just crumble.