It’s 1:30, and I’m sitting in a hospital room in Charleston.  In the bed next to me, my mother is floating in and out of sleep.  She has been here since the middle of yesterday, and we won’t know what’s going on until after 4:00 today when they do the Upper GI X-Ray.

This does not a happy Siobhan make.

When she called me this morning and admitted that she was in the hospital, it took me a minute to process this information.  Then I flew into a complete panic.  Of course, while I was in the process of throwing my stuff together to head this way, I managed to forget half of what I need.  It seems a trip to Wal-Mart is in order.

So I got on the road and realized that I was alone in the car with my thoughts, and I had a moment where I got so unbelievably mad at her that I wanted to scream.  My mom is my own personal superhero, but she’s stubborn as hell, too.  She has this bad habit of calling me with things like “oh, well I just got home from the hospital because I found out I’m allergic to Naproxen and ALMOST DIED AFTER TAKING ALEVE,” and expecting me to be okay with it. After the complete mental breakdown following that conversation, I told her that she better call me BEFORE she gets home, not after she makes sure she’s okay first.

She told me not to come this morning, but here I am.

I called my Dad when I got to Orangeburg and made him tell me where she was.  He didn’t tell her I was coming, because she would have made me go home.  If it were the other way around, I’d be telling her to go home and she’d be breaking the sound barrier to get to me.  That’s just how we are.

The worst part, she and her best friend were supposed to be leaving on their trip to Vermont today.  When I was getting here, I should have been finishing up lunch with them while they were on their way.

I can be as stubborn as she can, and I’m glad now that I was.  Part of it was the look on her face – She was expecting a nurse when the door opened, and got me instead.  Then Dad got called back to work, so she would have been here alone, and that thought bothers me.  I know she’s in good hands, but I still don’t like hospitals, I don’t like her being sick, and I don’t like feeling so damn helpless.  There isn’t a thing I can do except sit here and stare at the television.

I hate hospitals.  I do… I mean I REALLY hate hospitals.  I’ve spent a lot of time in them with various loved ones.  I’ve lost several of those people to them.  They mean sickness, and I don’t like sickness.

The last time I spent significant time in a hospital, it was with Rooster.  It has been a couple years since then, but I still haven’t gotten over it.  He still has no idea how sick he was, and every time I step foot into a hospital now, I can’t help but think about how scared I was… how close we came to losing him.

But this miserable train of thought is only going to drive me nuts today.  I have the laptop and I could easily be working on something useful – like a story – but that isn’t going to happen.  At least, not until I know that she’s alright and the tests are finished.  Looks like I’m going to have to hijack the majority of the hospital’s bandwidth and fire up the Warcrack to get myself going again.