Guys.

Please help us pray for Justin’s mom Toni. She is in and out of the ICU at Long Beach Memorial Hospital at the moment.

Justin is Brandon’s best friend. His wife, the lovely Olaina blogged about the entire story here first, then here (2), here (3) and here (4).

Justin is SUPERMAN. Seriously. His mom has been ailing for sometimes. Justin is the foot amputee Marine veteran currently in 3rd year medical school whose wife has been hospitalized in the past few years and is still adjusting. And he still keeps going. Seriously.

If he’s not Superman, I don’t know who else is.

And in difficult times, sometime you just have to find humor in it as Brandon and Olaina did. Here’s the excerpt from her blog.

Brandon and I talked–Brandon is Justin’s best friend and first advanced directive person after me. Brandon’s wife Oakley’s mom also has cancer. He said because I had called earlier and left Oakz a message telling her where we were and what we were doing, since we were in the neighborhood. When I called back he answered and said, “Do you still need rescuing?”

“This isn’t the sort of thing I can be rescued from. Unless of course we can throw up the cards and trade-in our mothers-in-law.”

“Nah, mine’s not any better than yours.”

I laughed. “That’s true. I was thinking maybe we both could get new ones.”

Gallows humor–we were both starting to laugh pretty hard. Then he started repeating it all to Oakz.

“I’ll see your cancer and raise you a stroke,” he said.

“Nope, I got you on that one too–she’s probably had a stroke.”

“Well, it’s worse for Oakley because she is so far away;” her mom is in Thailand.

“Naw, it’s worse for Justin because he’s in San Diego and she’s in LA–there’s still distance but seeing her doesn’t really help. I’d give you the second or third world doctors, but we’ve got the ghetto doctors and terrible medical insurance problem in this country.”

“Yeah–we’ve got witch doctors and you’ve got bad doctors.”