Someone from the hospital called to confirm my dad’s appointment tomorrow for his coronary artery bypass surgery. She said that we need to be at the hospital at 9:30am for some pre-op things to do, but the actual “procedure” would not begin until the early afternoon. After my mom got off the speaker phone, my dad says to us, “See how she said it’s a ‘procedure’? This isn’t surgery. It’s just a procedure, so this isn’t high risk or anything like that. They do so many of these every week!”

There are some forms of delusion that aren’t so terrible. This is one of them. If my dad is better able to accept this and have greater peace of mind when thinking of this as a “procedure” rather than a “surgery,” it’s completely fine by me.