I hope your mother is doing better. There are plenty of potential reasons why she and your father might not tell people about being in the hospital. Maybe she doesn’t want to bother anyone. Maybe she doesn’t want to ask for help. When I had to have surgery, I felt uncomfortable telling people I was going to being the hospital because I felt shy talking about myself. When I was pregnant with DD aand we found out about potentially life threatening problems with her, I didn’t want to tell anyone because talking about it made it more “real”. In other words, I think there are a variety of reasons why someone might not readily share this type of news, not simply pride.
There is a certain lack of empathy involved, though, too. When you’re in the hospital and don’t tell someone you’re close to, they feel left out. My dad’s cardiologist kept him for emergency by-pass surgery, and our dad didn’t intend to tell us! By-pass surgery! Yes, yes, he was in denial, but if we had such a serious surgery and didn’t tell him, he’d have rightly been upset about it.
If the family has a history of ignoring requests by the person in the hospital–visits when they’re asked not to, try to pressure the patient to do what they want instead of letting the patient make his or her own decisions, can’t bite their tongue when their opinion wasn’t asked for, and so on–that is a different case. If you decide to ignore someone’s wishes, you can’t be too surprised when they leave you out of the loop. Sometimes this goes on between adult siblings, but children aren’t told because the parents do not want to bad-mount the aunts and uncles or the grandparents.
This is why you can suggest that your parents tell their extended family, but you shouldn’t take it upon yourself to spread the word unless the situation is too dire for there to be a choice about it. As long as the relationship has not been broken off entirely, one’s siblings and parents deserve to know some things, after all. Most of the time, though, that is the decision of the person with the issue, and not anyone else’s. Your parents usually have to let you make your own mistakes, and sometimes you have to let them make theirs, too.
