Life Lately
Like most girls I’m really close to my mum. We can spend hours nattering away, drinking tea, and often take days off work to go do girly trips. So when my mum had a stroke last month and spent a month away from us in hospital, my whole world felt like it came down.
For the longest time we didn’t know what was wrong with mum, she was suffering from a horrible migraine for a week, and it took three separate trips to A&E, and two MRI scans before they decided to keep her in and investigate what was going on, and it was only until the second MRI scan that they discovered that she’d had a bleed on the brain. The next week was a horrible blur of hospital visits, doctors doing several more tests on mum, and one horrible horrible night where mum didn’t know who I was and we realised something had gone horribly wrong and we very nearly lost her. Then came more tests, and another emergency MRI scan to check whether they needed to perform surgery, before a very relieving phone call at 3am to say everything was okay, we weren’t going to lose her.
Slowly mum got better, and every evening when Dad and I visited she seemed more herself. Our local hospital realised she needed some more specialist help and transferred her to a specialist hospital in London, and this is where she really improved. They performed several more tests and discovered the extent of her brain damage, and the reasons behind the stroke. The doctors then diagnosed her with some syndrome with a long name that I can’t remember, but the main thing to take away from it all was that it was reversible, meaning that she would make a full recovery! We then had to wait another week while they did more tests to double check everything, and then a day we weren’t sure would ever happen happened, my mum got to come back home!
We don’t have a huge supportive family, and actually don’t talk to a few members, but during this time Dad and I had a huge overwhelming amount of support from our friends. From people bringing us food to check we were eating, to offering us endless cups of tea, to just phone calls and messages to see how we were all doing. This support was absolutely amazing, and really kept our spirits up when we were fearing the worst. It was amazing to see just how many people loved my mum, the woman has over 40 cards up in our front room to date, and the phone won’t stop ringing with her friends wanting to talk to her. If you know anyone who’s going through a tough time let them know that you’re there for them, even if you just send them a message, it will mean the world to them.
Mum has been home now a few days and is doing fantastically well. She’s still having a few issues with her visibility and gets confused on certain words and telling the time, but this will all come back in time. We are incredibly lucky to have her back with us so soon, and that she’s alive, we all feel so relieved. My mum is one strong badass woman, and her positivity throughout this all has been amazing, I really don’t know what we would have done without her.