My mom’s health is deteriorating again. I almost made this headline “My mom is dying,” but decided that was too melodramatic.This season seems to be about helping her and I think adoption may be on hold for a little while. Maybe not, but it feels that way. This has been a long season and I am weary. Lord knows she is weary and discouraged. It is so hard watching someone suffer when there is nothing you can do.
II Corinthians 12: 8-10
8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
My mother has been sick a good part of my life starting with Ovarian Cancer when she was in her mids 20s which led to a hysterectomy. The last decade has been the toughest though. We have spent several years in and out of emergency rooms with doctors unable to pinpoint the issue. She was always dehydrated and suffered from chronic diarrhea, vomiting and nausea, weakness, exhaustion, pain, fluctuating blood pressure and eventually moodiness and depression. I took her to the ER several times, stayed the night with her, then washed my face around 5 a.m. and headed straight to work while the doctor’s either sent her home again unsure what to do, or scheduled her for another ‘guess’ surgery. She was hospitalized more than a dozen times from 2005 to 2007. Each time putting more stress on her body and increasing her anxiety levels.
In September 2007 at my wedding, she was down to 75 pounds, basically about to starve to death and going into Addisonian crises.
Her body was not absorbing any nutrients. She kept getting weaker and the doctors just kept hydrating her with an IV and sending her home. At last in 2008, her doctor ran tests and discovered she had Addison’s Disease, total adrenal failure. Her body was not making the hormones it needed to survive: cortisol and aldosterone.
About the same time as her diagnosis, she went through total reconstructive bladder and bowel surgery, using the transvaginal mesh sling.
The treatment for Addison’s Disease has been steroids. If she does not take these, the risk is death. Unfortunately the steroids cause bone, muscle and joint deterioration and can also cause mental psychosis. We are seeing all of these in year five.
My mom has not gotten any better. She is in a great deal of pain and suffers from incontinence as a result of a botched mesh surgery. Her Addison’s disease has not improved at all. In fact, she has now reached brittle Addison’s Disease. This means the disease is unpredictable and unstable and she is frequently in the hospital. We just spent 50 of the last 100 days in a hospital. As amazing as Houston is when it comes to medical care, so many doctors have no idea what Addison’s Disease is. I still have to explain it 9 times out of 10 when we go to the ER.
She has had several TIA’s in the last couple of years and recently been diagnosed with a hole in her heart, a PFO.
Lately she is having memory problems. She forgets what day it is and the risk there is she could overdose on her medication accidentally. I was giving her medication to her weekly. I now give it to her daily.
She has fallen a few times and I worry about me not being at home all day as I work pretty far from the house. Controlling her meds has helped. We also now have home health coming by twice a week to check on her while I am at work and all my neighbors and friends keep an eye on her too and can be here in an instant.
Just a couple of months ago, I thought she was getting so much better and I was going to help her move into an apartment. I thought her own space would do wonders for her self-esteem. But now that is no longer safe. I can only hope she improves to that level again.
It is a roller coaster with my mom. One day she is fantastic and I want to plan a vacation to help her get away from all this stress, the next day I worry her days are very few.
I now enter the maze of figuring out and having all the difficult conversations folks must someday have with their aging parents: home health care, long term care, medical power of attorney, Medicaid and Medicare, will, funeral plans and everything else no one ever wants to talk about. My mom is only 51. I don’t like this one bit.
It is no wonder I don’t have my own kids yet. This could turn into a full-time job. I am not ready for that.
Please pray for my mom’s total healing during this time and that she would find her strength and courage in Christ. Please pray for all of us to have direction in this maze.
Tagged: Addison's Disease, adoption, aging parents, chronic illness, mesh sling, PFO
