Week full of shocks.

I have had a week full of shocks.


My first shock came on Monday when I found the doctors did not like the results of an echocardiogram, I had done the week before, and wanted to schedule some more tests.

My second shock came on Friday when I went in for what was to be a routine Cardiac Catheterization. I passed out during the test and woke up to find four large burns on my chest caused by having to be defibrillated--- TWICE.  

Don't be alarmed!  I'm fine and the test showed that I do not have any heart problems.  Doc's claimed I must have been allergic to the dye they used. 

  

But, the biggest shock of all came on Saturday when I opened my Facebook account to find a photograph of one of my brothers with a daughter he had just met for the first time.  A girlfriend from long ago had become pregnant but he did not marry her and had no contact with her during the next forty-four years.  His daughter decided to track her biological father down after all these years and there they were smiling at the camera.

My brother's wife of more than three decades and their children knew nothing of this love child.  When my younger brother refused to "do-the-right-thing" and marry the girl, my mother decreed (like a scene from the Godfather) that it would not be spoken of ever again within the family, and it wasn't.  Over half of my siblings who were either too young or not yet born grew up knowing nothing about it. Now, as they go to Facebook, they are learning they have a niece who is forty-three and their children have five new cousins. Not only that but one of our "new" sister's four daughters has a child which is the first great-great-grandchild of my mother.    

My mother is eighty-nine.  Would learning of this sudden addition to our family be too much of a shock for her extremely religious mindset?  Will she feel only the shame of illegitimacy and denial, or will she embrace all these new relations?

Boy, what a shocking week and I suspect there will be even more shocks yet to come.