So far life has managed to ruin just about every aspect my life since the new year started, and now it's going beyond a low blow. It's one thing to lose a car, someone you love and very much want, those things can be coped with and eventually forgotten. Family however is not a wound that heals. I've considered myself fortunate, alive for thirty one years and only once as a teenager did I have to see someone I cared about in a casket. I've never been emotionally strong when it comes to death, much like a star I collapse inward and shut down. And already I can feel it happening. My grandmother has been in and out of the hospital seven times since December, I had hoped, or rather foolishly clung to and believed, that the pace maker fixed whatever was wrong. I never knew the full story .. but today I do. After breaking down on the phone with my boss begging to be allowed to use a vacation day I rushed to the ICU unit. When I got there she didn't look that bad, somewhere on the inside I was jumping for joy ... again being foolish and falling into some false sense of hope and comfort. After we left my uncle told me in the parking lot that the appearance was deceiving and then some. She's been on oxygen for a while now, that much I know, but it's not just lung issues that has so bad off. Her heart is inflamed, swollen to the point that it stretches the valves. Where they should be opening and closing to allow blood to flow and keep blood from getting in where it shouldn't ... they're in the wind more or less. Doing next to nothing while her heart operates at about twenty percent, per the Doctor's terminology. She could have months or years left, naturally I think the doctors give the lowest estimate to be more accurate about the situation and her condition. People are given expiration dates all the time and surpass them by a long shot, and if I have any kind of fucking luck this year this will turn out to be a case like that. If I disappear suddenly you'll know I was wrong and stupid enough to be optimistic.