Leaping to a conclusion

This has been on my mind all day.

Your grandfather--my father--had been faced with a dilemma recently. Doctors had found a lump on his lung, but they didn't know what it was.

They did a needle biopsy, twice, but couldn't get enough cells to figure out what it was. So one of his doctors recommended having the lump surgically removed. Another recommended having a biopsy.

Your grandpa talked to me about it a couple of times. The doctor who didn't recommend the surgery told him that stray cells might be released during the surgery which could spread cancer throughout his body.

I didn't say this to him, but it seemed to me that the same disadvantage applied to having a biopsy. It's still surgery, but they take less stuff out.

The disadvantage to having a biopsy, I figured, was that it is a surgical procedure. Having a biopsy might just help the doctors determine that they needed to remove the lump after all, which would mean he'd have to have two surgeries instead of one.

Ultimately, your grandpa decided to have the lump removed. That was a couple of days ago.

He came out of surgery okay, and after a night in intensive care, they moved him to a private room. He didn't have an appetite, though, and started having trouble breathing. Then he developed a fever. Turns out he'd gotten pneumonia.

When I talked to the nurse, she told me that he'd taken a turn for the worse. She didn't sugarcoat it. She said they'd put him on a ventilator and moved him back into intensive care, where they'd planned to remove fluid from his lungs.

That's when Sterling and Angie decided to fly out.

Angie called this morning to give me an update. Turns out that during the sugery, they cut the nerve that controls half of his diaphragm and did something to his thyroid. Bottom line, one lung is no longer functioning and he has essentially no immune system.

I asked whether this was part of the surgery that they'd planned.

I can tell you right now that it wasn't. Nobody in his right mind would eviscerate a 79-year-old's immune system, and halve his lung capacity, in order to remove an unidentified lump. And I can further guarantee you that even if 73 doctors recommended such a procedure, your grandfather would find doctor #74.

He would never choose to have that kind of operation performed. Sure, remove a lump. But it would go entirely against his nature to agree to reduce his capacity to either breathe or fight disease, even if the doctors knew what the lump was and they knew that it was dangerously malignant.

Which leaves two possibilties: 1) It was a mistake. Somebody's hand slipped during surgery. Or 2) It was a bad decision. Once they had him open, they saw that the lump had somehow entwined itself with the nerve and they made the decision to take the nerve out with it.

Sterling is supposed to have a conversation with the surgeon tomorrow, and maybe then we'll get more of an answer. Which is irrelevant, anyway, because either way we're left with a man who has been crippled by the process that was supposed to help save him.

And it makes me furious.

Your grandfather is a lot of things--hard-headed, annoying, arrogant, and narrow-minded, and there have been many times when I've wanted to strangle the man. But he doesn't deserve this.

And here's the thing. He doesn't know yet.

He can't. He came out of surgery, then went onto pain medication. He's been almost constantly delirious, and I'm sure as far as he's concerned, he's simply in recovery.

I can't stop thinking about what they've done to him. It's cruel, really. And telling him might just break him.

It makes me sick.

Although not sick enough to check into that hospital.