Last night I went to my mother’s place and this morning we drove down here to Houston to visit my grandfather in the hospital.  He’s been having problems since he had stroke a few years ago, but lately he’d been having a lot of trouble with fluid in his chest and it is very hard for him to breathe.  He’s 91, so the doctors assumed that it was pneumonia, since that’s a common problem.  For the past month he’s been going through this kind of trouble.  Yesterday they finally performed an operation to try to drain the fluid.  That was when they discovered a very large tumor in his lung.  According to the doctors, this is a very agressive and hard to detect type of cancer (which they say is usually associated with asbestos exposure, although we don’t think that he was ever exposed in any significant way).  He’d had a number of X-Rays in the past month, but the cancer was not visible. 

Now the doctors are talking about trying to do chemo or radiation therapy, but he’s so weak and tired that it’s feared that he wouldn’t survive.  My grandfather has said that he’s tired of everything and that it’s his time.  He’s in a lot of pain from the cancer and from the drainage tubes.  It has been pretty hard on my mother to see her father in that condition.

We’re going to return to the hospital in the morning and will likely spend the day there.  Right now it’s a case of waiting and seeing what will happen.