Michelle’s Story

Michelle’s Story

Today is the first christmas without my mom. Today I feel like an orphan more than I did on November 10, 2009. You see, my mother loved christmas, the house was always decorated to the nines and the food abundant. My mom was an excellent cook and would make perogies and cabbage rolls and freeze them well ahead of christmas. Today there is perogies and cabbage rolls for christmas but the person who made them is no longer. The house that was once filled with activity lies alone in the dark as my father is with his extended family and us kids are spread out all over the country making due with our own little families. There is no reason to go home this year, its cold and far away and dad doesnt feel its worth the trip, not without mom because he isnt an entertainer, so he says. So 3500 km away I lie here and type…. with my own little turkey in the oven feeling sad and wishing November 10th did not occur. My moms passing was sudden, there was no time to prepare…. a 01:00am on November 5th I recieved a phone call with my dad hyperventilating on the other end trying to tell me in incoherent english that my mother was in trouble flying to the nearest city center on a lifeflight but was not expected to make the hours journey. My whole life changed at that moment. First I waited all night for the inevitable, it didnt come. I spoke to the surgeon who was up all night with her at 09:00 and he didnt feel she would make it until noon, she had lost too much blood, received enough blood through transfusion for nine people and had suffered oxygen deprivation to the vital organs on the lifeflight. Being 3500km away, I could not get to her by noon, however I could get to her by half past midnight if all my planes landed and took off on time. I boarded a plane at 5pm and had three transfers… each transfer I called hospital…. and each time they said she was holding. I had a lot of time to think on those flights….. a lot of regrets ….. I have been living away from my mother since 1993. I have limited myself to one maybe two visits per year and most visits were strained due to her alcoholism. My mother was a 26oz a day vodka drinker, also known as what is called a “high functioning alcoholic”…. one that held a job for 20+ years, raised a family, cooked three meals a day, kept her house in order and loved to entertain and was good at it. She painted pictures, made furniture and recently started her own card business…. my mom an alcoholic…”no way” is what most would think. I am her daughter, I lived with her and I was privy to the truth and her self abuse affected my life. There was a time when I begged and pleaded through tears for her to stop drinking citing that I didnt want to end up without a mother. Her response was always and right up until the day she was vomiting blood all over the emergency room that “she was not an alcoholic, she merely enjoyed her drink”. As years went on, I started to keep my mouth shut because it was apparent to me that I was the only one who viewed her as a chronic alcoholic… I mean, she could function quite well, she wasnt on a park bench with a newspaper over her face each and every morning hoping to beg for enough money for breakfast. No, not my mother, she was a semi-retired, well travelled well to do mom, wife and grandmother who never quit, she was anything but an alcoholic. I knew, as I flew my planes home wondering if I would ever be able to speak to or hug my mother again, that this day was inevitable, I just didnt know how it would unfold. I spoke to my mother on the phone three days before this fiasco, we talked about nothing really, just what she was doing (finishing up the christmas food) and how my school was going… when we said goodbye neither said “I Love You”…. it was a waiting game for us. I wouldnt say it first and she knew it…. sometimes she would just say it and immediately I would say it back, but it was never consistent… you see, I learned at a very young age that my mothers behaviors and ideas were not consistent and I learned to protect myself from the disappointments. As I flew home that night, I was regretting this game…. telling myself I should have just said it first and not even worried if she said it back or not. I landed at my destination on time where I was greeted by my father and my eldest daughter. Both looked dishevelled and stressed, my dad moreso than my daughter. We went immediately to the hospital where I was greeted by my brother who I havent seen for 5 years. Families with alcoholism are usually dysfunctional and ours were no exception…. mom had this way of keeping us all apart and making herself the center of attention. She would manipulate us just enough to avoid one another, never fighting but never wanting to be in each others company and it didnt help that she invited us all for visits at separate times. Mom was good at her games which was part of the reason I was 3500km away and there were times I wish it was further. I entered the ICU at 1:15am and that person, or better yet that thing on the bed was not my mom. What I saw was a very bloated and disfigured human being, not my mom. My first instinct was to run the other way, ask where my mom was…… but deep down I knew this was her and I knew she was sick but to actually see it was another story. Mom woke up to the sound of my voice…. her eyes were swollen shut but when she heard me she made such effort to look at me that one barely opened and what I saw shook me to the core. My mom looked like a pitiful creature staring up at me wanting help…. she stared with that little watery eye craning her neck…. and I said ” Mom, I am here and I love you” she then tried to pull her respirator tube out and the nurse stopped her eventually tying her hand down… she was really agitated, she wanted to talk to me… I told her to calm down and that we were going to get through this… she shook her head NO….. over and over again….. trying to get to her tubes…. she got so agitated they enduced her sleep…. I never got to talk to her again, she never came out of that sleep… for four more days I sat by my mothers bedside on the rollercoaster of ICU (one day they tell you things are looking up and an hour later things can crash, its not a consistent place) hoping for a second chance…. thinking if we did get through this perhaps everything would be different now. Moms cirrhosis was out in the open now, nobody could deny how sick she was. The surgeon had a meeting with us and explained that moms liver was very damaged and was not producing the required platelets that give blood its clotting factor and that the toxins in her blood were quite high, she suffered a major bleed from complications due to esophageal verices and portal hypertension. She used up all the blood at her local hospital and was without blood for so long there was kidney and lung damage due to lack of oxygen … her prognosis was not good but there was a tiny chance because her heart was so strong that she may stabalize but that it would be a long recovery if ever a recovery. I had many visions of mom getting through this, cleaning up her life and getting through the next 20 years clear headed rather than in a fog. I had dreams of her and I getting close again, like when she was young and not so bitter and manipulative….. I sat by her bed at night with a book sometimes staring at her teary eyed wishing she would wake up and say ” its going to be alright”…… on day four, everything went harry….. she started bleeding again, her kidneys shut down completely and dialysis couldnt keep up to the toxin levels…. the surgeons gathered us in a room and pretty much said she is done, we could either wait it out a day or so or pull aggressive life support. As a family we decided mom wouldnt want this….. us sleeping in chairs….. knowing the inevitable…watching her slowly die over days…. so we decided to pull the life support. Well, if anyone has ever had to make that decision they understand the process. In my mind, when a person is so drugged up as my mother was and life support is pulled, one expects, at least I expected, her to just go to sleep, like a pet who is euthanized….. wrong……. at least in this case, my mother’s eyes opened, and she looked afraid… she gasped for air for at least ten minutes… it felt like 30… it was the worst thing I had ever experienced in my life…… and will never forget. For days after I wondered if we did the wrong thing, if we made the wrong decision…… but after researching everything I could about her condition, I realize we did not. Mom never would have walked out of that hospital…. she would have eventually died and could have suffered for a long time before. Her body was very sick, it was giving up and the damage was irreversible. Part of me died that day in ICU at 3:10pm on November 10, 2009…. I will never be the same. I learned alot about the liver, its probably the most important organ in your body…. its the only organ that cannot be artificially stabilized, without it, you die. I also learned that life is short and that you have to take it for what its worth and do the best you can because eventually, we all die. I learned that I will never put my kids through that and have promised to take better care of myself. I used to be an every day couple glasses of red wine kind of person, since this has happened its been a couple glasses maybe twice a week if that. I enjoy my wine with food pairings, I no longer just sit and have a couple to unwind because I cherish my liver. Today I am learning that Christmas will never be the same in our family and that I am now the matriarch of my family. It is now my turn to make the perogies and cabbage rolls and to decorate the house like a fanatic….. but not this christmas…… this christmas I am taking it easy, remincsing and thinking about how beautiful and wonderful my mother was. My mother was unique and her memory will be cherished in my mind as I slowly but surely disregard all the turmoil she caused…. after all, she was an alcoholic….mind you by choice, however, I know she loved me, she loved my brother, my father and her grand kids. For reasons we will never understand she chose to drink herself to death, we can never really know what goes on in someone’s mind when they are so deeply sad inside that there only relief is a bottle of vodka. Rest in Peace Mom…… I Love YOU