I've been sitting and stirring over writing about what happened late last week, unsure over whether I'd talk about it on here or what I'd have to say about it. Blogging has been very therapeutic for me since I started writing over 4 years ago, so I figured I might as well discuss it here.
I got a call last Friday night into Saturday morning around 2:30 AM from my sister. I knew something had to be up just from the sight of her name on my caller ID. Before I even had answered the phone, I was a little nervous about what this was about.
She said our mom had some kind of seizure that night and was already in the hospital. At that point, there was also the possibility she had had a stroke, though no one was sure what exactly she had experienced. To say I was shocked and unprepared for that kind of news would be an understatement. My sister went on to say that she and her boyfriend were going to head to the hospital to stay with her the rest of the night. My mom was already set to have both a CAT scan and MRI, though neither had been performed just yet.
We hung up, and I laid in bed wondering what to do next. Do I get dressed now and head to the hospital as well? Should I wait until morning?
I wound up trying to go back to sleep and would go to the hospital in a few hours. Going back to sleep was almost out of the question since my mind was racing in all kinds of directions.
At that point, I was somewhat hoping my mom had a seizure instead of a stroke. It felt like the lesser of two evils, considering recovering from a seizure is a much less daunting task than doing so from a stroke. I've known people who have dealt with seizures since childhood, and they're able to live fairly normal lives. Strokes can be much more severe (from the little that I know of them), and I didn't want to think about what kind of effect a future stroke could have on my mom.
By morning, I called my sister back to check up on her. She was quite frazzled to say the least, and even got pretty emotional over the sight of our mother laying in a hospital bed. Mom had already had her CAT scan by then, and the doctors found no abnormalities on her. The MRI was coming later, so we had to play the waiting game on that.
In the interests of relative brevity, I'll jump ahead a bit to her MRI. Those results didn't show anything either, and a neurologist examined my mom as well. All signs and symptoms had pointed towards seizure, and my mom had talked about feeling dizzy at times over the previous few weeks. The doctor wondered about the possibility that my mom had experiences seizures during her sleep and woke up not even aware of what may have happened overnight.
My mom was discharged from the hospital on Sunday, and this week my sisters and I have taken shifts over watching her and taking care of her. I'm on duty as I write this, and later today I have to take her in for an appointment to conduct an EEG. My mom is in much better condition now than she was on Saturday, and we're more concerned about determining the cause of the seizure than anything else now.
Still, this entire ordeal got me thinking about something from a much more macro perspective than the immediate fact that my mom was in the hospital. As children - and to our parents, we are all still children even once we become grown adults - it's easy to think our parents will always be around. We may even take them for granted in that regard, possibly thinking of them as immortal. After the first phone call with my sister, my mind started to picture what life might be like without my mother. Those thoughts had scared me more than most anything else I had thought about in a very long time.
It's probably fairly selfish of me to think that I'm not willing to part with my mom yet. I have several friends who have lost at least one of their parents, and they've been able to keep on living after the grieving period. My mom is still fairly young though; she just turned 59 in January. She's even been fairly conscious of her health prior to this incident, so she's been eating healthier foods and getting regular exercise. She's worked on adding years on her life, and frankly I hope that I don't have to think about the idea of losing her again for a very long time.
During my second year of college, I took a sociology class. One thing that has stuck with me from that class nearly 15 years later was an exercise my professor had conducted one day. He told us all we would have to write down an instinctive response as an answer to a question about a scenario, and we wouldn't have time to think about what we were going to say. The scenario was this: You're stuck on a life raft with your mother, spouse, and child after your boat out in the ocean had capsized. Suddenly, a storm comes in, and waves rock the raft back and forth. Everyone in the boat is thrown clear, and you have only enough time to save one of the three other people in your boat. Write down which person who you're going to save.
My professor yelled out, "WRITE IT!"
Everyone in the class was obviously startled, and my instinctive answer was "child." That was the most popular answer in the class by far, but once my professor had tallied up all the numbers he pointed out something very interesting. In our country, our natural response would be save the child since the kid has virtually his or her entire life to live. However, in other places across the globe - especially the Far East - the most popular answer to that question by far would be mom. The logic behind it is in such a dire situation, a person could theoretically marry again and/or have more children later in life, but an individual is only ever going to have one mother. A mother - or father, for that matter - can't be replaced.
I suppose I sound like a mamma's boy in writing this post, and to some extent that's true. But when I think about what may have happened had one or two details of this story been different, I don't mind being a mamma's boy.
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