It's rarely an easy thing when someone you love is suffering physically. When I was in my early twenties my mother suffered a major heart attack, completely out of the blue, in the early morning hours of New Year's Day. When I initially looked back at that time I wondered how it was I didn't see it coming. It didn't take long to piece it all together. For years we'd all been concerned that my father would have a heart attack, he had an incredibly stressful job as a deputy fire chief, he struggled to relax during holidays and any ordinary task he tackled would be plagued by bad luck. He had that attitude of 'If you want a job doing well do it yourself' that made it impossible for him to stand aside and watch any member of his family accomplish something by themselves. To add to that he was, and is, a very strong personality, someone whose character is stamped in every line of his face. Compared to him my kind-hearted mother stood in the shadows. Small wonder we didn't see her fate coming.
For years my mother and I had struggled to get along. I was a late child, who had the ill-fortune to hit my teenage years at the same time as my Mum hit her menopausal ones. I was also too like my father in some ways, something which was a source of amusement to her before my hormones went into over-drive, but failed to be one after. In the years running up to her heart attack she grew increasingly frustrated, easily irritated, and overly anxious about the state of the house, relations coming to stay, and the amount of times we had to uproot our lives to follow my Dad's job around the country.
Our family of six, myself and three brothers, gradually dwindled to just the three of us as my brothers paired off with wives / girlfriends. My mother lost her few friends during our final move, and her own family were long gone before I turned six. The only family she had left were her children, husband, and my father's family who tended to descend on our home with a sense of entitlement at least once a year whilst my Mum danced attendance on them. Her life became entirely focused on keeping the house clean, looking after her remaining child, wondering why my brothers were so terrible at staying in touch and trying to sooth my father's increasingly ruffled feathers.
Which brings us to New Year 1994. My Gran had just headed home after spending Christmas, she was a lovely woman but always left my Mum with an impression of thinking her second-best after my father's first wife left him. Mum had been busy prior to her visit, trying to ensure that everything would go smoothly, that the house left no room for complaint, that the food was perfect, and had spent the entire time during it on pins. New Year's Eve was a quiet affair with just the three of us together, I think we stayed up to see the hour strike but honestly can't be sure.
It was 3 o'clock when I heard my mother call out. It's not an easy thing to wake me once I've fallen asleep, I slept through an entire hurricane during my teenage years and woke up wondering what had happened to the electricity before throwing open the curtains to find the trees all lying on the floor. I could just hear her voice calling my father's name plaintively. I didn't think anything of it at first, they'd been sleeping seperately for a few nights, which wasn't an unusual thing, so I assumed my Mum was trying to wake my Dad for some reason and I rolled over to get back to sleep. Only something stopped me. When her voice carried on calling I got up and opened the door seemingly seconds after my Dad who was now a hive of industry, on the phone for an ambulance as my Mum laid on the floor in the hallway next to a wooden planter my Dad had made years earlier. The planter, it later turned out, had probably saved her life.
The story, as my Mum tells it, was that she had been feeling tired during the day but thought nothing of it, until she woke with a blinding pain in her upper abdomen during the middle of the night. She got up quietly, trying not to disturb anyone else, assuming it was a bad bout of indigestion. Halfway down the hall the pain in her chest grew until she passed out, but as she fell towards the floor her face struck the planter and knocked her back into consciousness. Another pain grew in her chest so she cried out for my father. If she hadn't called for help, if she'd stayed on the floor unconscious, her heart would have continued to struggle and she would likely have died.
It turned out she'd had three attacks that night, and as we travelled slowly over the ice covering the country lanes towards the hospital in the ambulance, it turned out her body was preparing for a fourth devastating attack that would have finished her. For two days she lay in ICU, her face puffed and blue from the bruises the planter caused, whilst my father cried, a shocking sight to me, my brothers appeared, and I stood by numbed by all that had happened. It took months before I cried, until then I seemed to watch from the sidelines as everyone folded around me.
The following years saw my mother recover partially but as time went on she developed diabetes, problems with her circulation due to the damage her heart attack had caused, and an increase in weight as she found it increasingly hard to lose any. She was only in her early fifties when this had happened, not significantly over-weight, and the only indication she had given of being at risk of an attack was her overly anxious nature. The doctors shook their heads and said it must be a genetic fault. At which my mother broke down and apologised to us all, she is an incredibly selfless person.
My mother has never been the sort of person to sit back. Any form of illness rarely saw her take to her bed, and she expected the same of the rest of us. Complaints of sickness or injury were met with little sympathy and she dealt with herself the same way. And so it was post-heart-attack. She tackled Life the same as she had before, spending hours in the garden and then talking to me on the phone of how many aches and pains she was suffering as a result. Any advice to take things more easily was rebuffed, she had her standards and was determined to keep to them, no matter what her body told her.
The next two decades were not easy ones. My relationship with her blossomed after the shock of almost losing her, but her relationship with my father didn't. For many reasons he left after more than 30 years of marriage and they spent four painful years apart. The only bright side to this time was that after emigrating to Canada for three years, my husband and I had moved back to settle near my parents after finding out I was pregnant. My Mum was delighted, but those four years were very lonely ones for her. In spite of us living only a few miles away she had to spend most nights by herself, in a house that was now too big and filled with memories of a life that was now past.
Then my husband's company closed down and even we had to leave her, not an easy decision but unfortunately the only one we were able to take. We returned to North America, almost echoing my parents lives as we travelled every two years or so between jobs. My Mum came to visit us, but her health wasn't always up to it and our finances weren't always up to us reciprocating. It was a dark time.
My parents ended up reconciling a few years after this and became better friends as a result of the time apart. My father moved back in but as the years went on my Mum became less able to travel and her health deteriorated, each time I saw her it was a shock how much older she looked and how she struggled to get about. Visits to the doctor failed to find anything that they could help her with, to improve her daily living, in spite of her developing a cough that failed to go away, and her weight continuing to increase despite a healthy diet.
Then a few months ago she began to have trouble breathing. There was no pattern to it, she could be sat reading and all of a sudden her breath would go. Tests revealed one of her heart valves was failing and an artery connected to her heart had suffered too much damage. Something needed to be done. When my father called weeks later to tell me the doctor had recommended open-heart surgery I felt relief, at least something could be done, and even better, it would give her back a good part of the quality of life that the heart attack had robbed her of years before. But my mother was naturally devastated. Especially as the odds of not surviving were one in a hundred.
The operation was initially scheduled a few weeks ahead for the middle of December 2011. But, typically of the NHS in the UK, it was re-scheduled, and then re-scheduled again as my Mum caught one winter cold after another, her immune system low as a result of her health issues. Finally, she went in last Sunday, the 12th of March 2012, three months late. The operation took more than six hours, an incredible amount of time, and a shock for my parents as the first they heard of this was after she was admitted.
I'm overwhelmingly grateful that my mother is alive in a day and age were heart surgery can be performed mostly successfully, but it's still the most invasive and horrible sounding procedure that can be imagined. Her chest was opened up, her breast-bone cut through to expose her heart and then wired back together again to speed recovery. Her heart would have to be stopped so that the valve could be replaced whilst a machine kept her alive by doing the heart's usual work of pumping her blood through the rest of her body. The thought of stopping my mother's heart is a sickening one, and one I don't like to dwell on, no matter that it is necessary to give her her life back. Even worse, the thought of her heart actually being exposed for an entire medical team to lean over and look upon sounds like some form of medieval torture or nightmare.
I'm writing this history three days post-operation. So far things seem to have mostly gone according to plan. My father was allowed to visit my Mum the following day but she was barely conscious so he stayed just forty minutes, leaving her to get the much needed rest after such major surgery. Unfortunately, when he arrived the next afternoon it was to find that she had developed an infection in her chest, leaving her still tired, pale, and behind schedule in her recovery. I only wish that I were able to visit her too, to offer support and help keep her spirits up, but for many reasons this hasn't been possible. Instead I'm stuck thousands of miles away, having to hear the entire event second-hand with most of the story happening whilst I sleep with our time difference being eight hours behind. Add to this the fact that Mothers Day in the UK is this coming Sunday and you can imagine how terrible I feel. It looks likely my Mum will still be in hospital when it comes, with apparently none of her children around her as my youngest brother now lives in the States and couldn't fly over either and my other two brothers haven't spoken of plans to visit since travelling to see her before she went in.
I'm sure anyone reading this will think us a terrible family, in some ways you'd be right. I travelled over twice last year to see my parents, in May for our official visit, and then again in August after she started to have breathing difficulties. I wasn't keen to go in August because I knew it would be the only time I could fly due to financial difficulties and was concerned that there might be another time I would be needed even more, but my father insisted I come in spite of my arguments, and so now I'm stuck here, wishing I was there but with my hands tied.
The other reason is that my mother insisted I not come. I could have just chalked it up to a difficult debt to clear, I'd have been happy to under the circumstances, but she said her recovery could only succeed if she didn't have an audience she felt she had to play up to. My mother is an incredibly proud woman, who hates to be seen in any form of weakness. She still hasn't forgiven my father for encouraging family to visit her after her heart attack, when she had no make-up on, hair unwashed, and caught wearing her nightie. She'd rather sit quietly alone in the hospital bed than suffer the stress of having to make herself presentable at the cost of her recovery. I can understand that, I don't agree with her but I have to respect her wishes. I think I'll feel very differently if her recovery takes a fatal downturn and I'm not there to see her one last time.
It's a terrible thing to talk to your mother on the phone before such a major event and to wonder, on hanging up the receiver, if that was the last time you were going to hear her voice. It's a terrible thing to watch someone's quality of life be taken away from them so quickly and with little warning and then to have a potential fix dangled in front of your eyes and wonder if it will ever come to pass.
I hope I have some good news next time I write. My Mum had so many plans before she went in. She was planning on travelling out to see us for next Christmas, as she hasn't been well enough to fly for more than three years now. My parents planned to sell the big house to move back to their beginnings in Southport, the town I last lived in when I was five, but those plans had to be shelved after the news of her surgery came out. And her more immediate plan, that I'm a little mad with her about, is to read the Mothers Day card that I sent her in time to arrive before her surgery, that has written inside of it everything I wanted to say to her but couldn't without breaking down and upsetting her. If she never gets to read that card I will suffer the pain of it over and over again. I wish she could have read it before the surgery, but she thought it would bring bad luck and wanted it to be something to look forward to. Still, I would hate for her to not have the chance, not that she doesn't know how I feel, but I would like her to hear it again, at least once, before she goes. Whenever that is.
Enjoy your family, we always know we have a limited time together, but it never seems a reality until we have a brush against it. Some of us are lucky enough to get a second chance, but don't bank on it happening. I don't anymore.
