My stupidity is not important

I'm dumb, but my poker idiocy is not important.

One of the guys from my poker game (and a great guy in his own right, even if he never played poker with me) is in the hospital.

The day after Christmas, Kida had a brain aneurysm. I'm not smart enough to know what that really means, until I look it up on webmd.com. I will classify that under Very Serious Shit until such time has he walks into my apartment and tell me to deal him in.

Knowledge about his situation is tough to come by. I know he had emergency surgery, and a stay in ICU. There was something about a surgery-induced coma, that he is since out of. His family is privvy to visits and all the info, and the info is hard to come by. While not a religious man, I know Kida is, and I've said a prayer or three to his God and/or my God to give him some help. The latest news is that he's doing better, the surgeries (plural?) have helped, he's getting better, but he's still not well enough to leave the hospital.

Today's my off day, and hopefully he'll be well enough to have me visit him in the hospital.

And yes, I'm so cheesy that I'm bringing a deck of cards and some chips. If he wants to play, we'll play. If he can't play, maybe I'll put some aces by his bedside.

He's only one month older than I am. This isn't supposed to happen.

UPDATE:
Kida is still in the hospital, recovering. As just one of the guys that knows him well, I'm not allowed to visit him. Actually, nobody is. The game plan for Kida is slow for the time being. He's recuperating, and they want to keep his blood pressure low. They also want to give him a CAT scan every day for two weeks to make sure that nothing else is going wrong in his brain, and he's healing up.

So they reason that if he had visitors, he'd perk up, and his increased blood pressure might hurt his healing, in his brain and elsewhere.

So I haven't been in to see him, but I have had his best friend promise me that he'll talk to me immediately when he's well enough to see people. This is the same best friend that snuck into the hospital to watch Kida get wheeled into the OR with a phalanx of medical staffers moving monitoring equipment with him.

He had a look of astonishment, and sadness about him.

At least he has emotions. At least he has hope. He's on the way up. I just have to wait until he's well enough to receive visitors.

~~

And it never makes me sad when I'm actually playing poker, to think about Kida. I don't - I'm always so focused on the game at hand. Everyone in the game I host, we all know Kida, almost everybody has played with him. It's afterwards, when I reflect on things, that I think about the tough times that face him... then, I get sad.

How can I help? How can I make a difference?

Right now, it's waiting. It's prayer - from a man who believes that God exists, and isn't sure of much else. In the days to come, I hope to be useful and comforting.