in baltimore

[magicicada]

ggma is okay. just for a bit of orientation; ggma is sylvia's great grandmother aka my grandmother. in any case, we finally get up here to visit and gma ends up in the hospital. what this means is that we were only able to visit her briefly before she got tired out. gma is very very sharp which is reassuring and she's doing a lot of complaining, which for her means all systems are operating well. the worst part is that children are not allowed in the hospital, not just the cardiac care unit, but the whole damn thing. this strikes me as abundantly primative. especially after the nurse very kindly explained how much of this was for our benefit and then went on to tell the horror stories about the germs being tracked out on everyone's shoes back to the lobby. yea, well that's where sylvia was waiting because she's a bit young to just leave in the car. bastards. however, after the whole spiel about how the ban was to protect sylvia from the nasty germs, she did say that since it was for sylvia's protection it was our call. since sylvia is still fairly controllable it was an easy call. we brought her up for a very brief visit, closed the drapes and let ggma touch (not hold because that would have been too much work) her ggdaughter. i think it was definitely worth it for her. i somehow manage to forget over and over that gma's eyesight is failing. to me, it seems like she can see fine, but then she'll make some comment about how she can't really see sylvia but she was glad to meet her. she held sylvia's little hand and exclaimed over how tiny it was. it really was beautiful and yet so brief. visiting hours don't even start until 1pm tomorrow and we really need to start heading back home by 2 at the latest. i wouldn't really mind that too much, but uncle don and aunt kathy are visiting tomorrow and visitors really do tire her out. the last thing i want to do is to stress her. i called mom and she seemed to think it would be ok if i didn't go back tomorrow. the plan is to visit in another couple of months and hope that she isn't back in the hospital again. the really horrible thing is that this is the second time in about 4 mos that gma's ended up in the hospital for shortness of breath and she's doing fairly well for a woman in her 80's, but i just don't know that she'll be around long enough for sylvia to have clear memories of her, let alone really get to know her.

ok. i guess that's enough for a quick note. thank heavens for unguarded hotel wifi connections.