Mama

Thank you so much for the prayers.. it means the world to us to know that so many people love and care for us and Mama... they and our complete faith in the Lord are the only reasons we have gotten through the last 2 hardest weeks of our lives.

For those of you who may not know... Mama's surgery went fine... the tumor (it was malignant) was removed from her right kidney and Dr. Ogan was even able to save 2/3 of her kidney. It was after that.. on last Friday to be exact that things took an ugly turn. Mama was moved to the ICU on Saturday afternoon for breathing trouble and the beginnings of pneumonia. That was only the awful beginning. By that night she was totally unable to breathe on her own and put on a ventilator. The next day, we had to make gut-wrenching decisions... we found out she was septic (blood infection all over her body), she had to have multiple (I'm talking seriously at least 10) IVs, a central line put in the left side of her neck, a dialysis port in the right side of her neck, a drainage tube put in her nose down into her stomach, an arterial line to constantly monitor blood pressure and heartrate (plus some other stuff that is way over my head)... and that is all in addition to the 6-8 inch incision on her right side and drainage tube/bag from it. Her kidneys failed on Sunday. Her heart was out of rhythm on Monday morning, causing doctors to have to "shock" her with paddles 2 times over the course of only 3 hours. She ended up having 3 more episodes with her heart that day, but thankfully the others were controlled with a new medication... that the nurse had to adjust almost constantly for about 12 hours... Mama's heartrate/ blood pressure would shoot sky high and then just plummet the next second.

As I sent here now, on Friday afternoon, I am looking through the window at my sweet mother... tubes everywhere, her blood circulating through a machine and then back to her body, her chest pumping up and down as the ventilator pushes air into her... it is excruciating. My heart has already broken. Daddy's heart has broken. David's heart has broken. But, we have hope. We haven't gotten really bad news now in over 36 hours. Mama opened her eyes and looked at me for a few seconds today. She will shake her head or wiggle her toes to answer questions at times... but she grimaces in pain and fear... you can see the confusion and fear in her expression and it hurts so bad that all I can do is hold her swollen hand and stroke her hair... little comfort for her I know.

She is fighting hard... so hard. We can only hope that she is now on the right track.. the long road to recovery. I want my best friend back.