Today is not a good day. In fact, it's been one of the hardest yet. I made a couple of stupid mistakes in stories over the weekend because I'm so brain-addled.

Apparently, the mind-fog is a symptom of grief. I was quilting last night and I had to rip out seams six times in two hours because I sewed the wrong pieces together. When I came in this morning and discovered I made mistakes, I just fell apart.

Thank God for hospice. I called the bereavement counseling department and a counselor agreed to see me immediately. I was there in 20 minutes and she spent more than an hour with me.

One of the things Kim, the counselor, said was that grief is like walking along the beach and being bowled over by a wave, getting up and walking along and being bowled over again. As time goes on, the interval between waves increases.

She also said grief tends to get worse for a couple of months before it gets better. That explains why I keep feeling worse.

I remember hearing the term "complicated grief" in writing about bereavement and hospice, and Kim said any time a parent loses a child the grief is complicated by the fact that it's against the natural order of things.

Mine is complicated by the frustration and anger I feel over the way Michael was ignored by the doctors at Memorial Health in Savannah. I've been trying to get the hospital to talk to me about developing a policy around failure to treat, but they keep blowing me off. They're afraid I'll sue, even though I've said I won't if they work with me. An apology would be a start, but hospitals are afraid to apolpgize. They just circle the wagons.

There was a piece in the New York Times yesterday about how some doctors and hospitals are apologizing for mistakes and that lawsuits decline when they do that.

No duh, as Mike used to say. Just admit that my son was treated poorly. The fact that you admit it means there's a level of remorse. Believe me, that would make me feel so much better. Instead, you build walls and tell me you're looking into it. All that says to me is that your ethics are lacking. If you don't know it's immoral to not treat someone with a complete colon blockage, you deserve to be sued. And it shouldn't take two months to figure it out. It's all right there in his records. ... "patient can't afford a colonoscopy" ... "Couldn't get scope beyond narrowing in colon. Patient's wife had stepped out for a moment. Patient should call."

They sent him home with no instructions to call and no word that they couldn't even finish the test. That's in the records and they still won't acknowledge it. You bet my grief is complicated by frustration and anger.