Think about what that means.

My surgery was not a tragedy that my family, in a moment of weakness, cynically took advantage of after the fact.

My incapacity was a prerequisite they had been researching in advance — a condition they needed me to be in, and were waiting for me to enter, so that a plan already drafted could finally be executed.

When I had gone in for that operation, frightened and trusting, kissing my husband goodbye at the pre-op doors, my mother-in-law had already spent months learning the precise legal mechanics of robbing exactly the helpless, medicated, bedridden woman I was about to become.

That is a specific kind of cold that I did not have a category for before, and have never quite recovered from since.

They did not seize an opportunity.