I figured I should start the month well and blog. I haven't posted in a while. You know how when it rains it pours... well it's a frickin thunderstorm here!!
My folks and I were supposed to go to vegas together in october. The plan was for them to gamble and for me to attend this conference. That didn't quite happen. I went to the conference, without my parents. My mother collapsed the day she was supposed to fly to San Francisco. What happened the week after was the discovery of a tumor in her colon and surgery and a week of waiting to see if the tumor was malignant and if she would need chemotherapy. The doctors told us that the likelihood of it was high since the tumor was so large.
It was a huge sigh of relief to hear that the tests came back negative. My mother still needed to recover from surgery but she would otherwise be fine. Living so far away from Singapore I was rendered somewhat helpless and was trying to figure out how to finangle a way back home in the middle of crunch time at work. My mother was totally depressed during that week. I'm the sort of person who believes that anything can happen as long as you believe you can. And hearing her so despondent, wondering what she'd done to deserve this, I was speechless. I told her to hang on and to hold on to hope. My mother, who is stubborn as hell refused to believe otherwise.
In all this craziness though, and after hearing the good news, my mother did realize a few things- how much we all love her and how little work really means. My mother's work ethic is unbelievable. She is the person you would call at 2am and she would be ok with it, even if it wasn't an emergency. We always told her to take it easy and that life would still go on and that someone else would have to shoulder the burden some day. I guess she never believed it until this past week. She's letting go of work and realizing that her time could be better spent with family and friends. Previously she never understood why my brother and I didn't take work as seriously as she did. She now does.