Thoughts of My Son - Update

It's after 11:30 PM and I am back from Virginia Beach General Hospital. The bike accident involved a wipe out after a chain on his bike popped loose which resulted in him having the end of the straight angle handle bar jab him hard in the stomach just under his ribs on his left side. Readers need to understand that Pete is a bicycling maniac and has ridden his bike from Richmond to Virginia Beach - i.e., over 100 miles - in a single day, so he is hard core. He is no sissy.

He is resting and sedated for pain and will be monitored over night and a determination made not later than tomorrow whether or not his spleen needs to come out. I hope an pray that it does not (1) because he'll recover faster and (2) because without a spleen one is more susceptible to infection, etc. If things change during the night, my ex-wife will call me since she lives much closer to the hospital and/or may decide to spend the night there.

Pete was in pretty good spirits - I guess morphine will do that - and very warm towards me. Needless to say when I hugged him before leaving I started to tear up, which I think he noticed. We just talked on the phone a minute ago too and I did start crying when he said he loved me. If nothing else, maybe this will help mend some of the mess left over from the divorce wars.

I will confess that it was weird sitting there in the room for over two hours with Pete and the ex-wife after not speaking for over a year and after all the nastiness. She was actually quite cordial. My youngest daughter (pictured with Peter in the prior post) blew in for a while too with one of her friends that we have known all her life, and caused some humor and laughter. Fortunately, Beach General is a good hospital - that's where my oldest was miraculously stabilized when she was stricken with meningitis in 1999 - and my sister is on staff there (and can access information and reports for us). She's confirmed that the surgeons that will operate if need be, are among those that she'd letter do surgery on her - always a good standard of approval. So now, it's a waiting game. NOT my strong suit.

The other irony is that while we were hanging out in Pete's room - they moved him to a floor from the ER - was that conversation came up about the former next door neighbors. Apparently the husband beat the daylights out of the wife while they were in California for a family event last week and put her in the hospital yet again. I guess he's being automatically charge under California law for assault or some other charge. Why she ever stayed with him baffles me. I find it especially ironic because he was SOOO nasty and hateful towards me after I came out and moved out. He sad nasty stuff about what I was doing to my family and the trauma I cuased pales compared to his behavior. I could not help but think that perhaps me being gay looked WAY better to the ex-wife and my son after this latest incident.