I haven’t written anything new for a while, because all sorts of things happened and we didn’t know if my mother could attend a transplant surgery after all – there was one moment when I wanted to deactivate the donation, but now there’s new hope.

We found a decent dialysis center here in Timisoara that she currently attends for about three weeks – they offer free transport and vital medication, also for free.

Why did we look for another dialysis center? Let me resume the story I told you about in July:

Update 7.07.09: My mother did an echographic examination a few hours ago and the doctor found her, among other complications, with mitral stenosis. That happens when the space between the valves separating the atrium and the ventricle becomes narrower. That narrowing increases the pressure in the lungs and she can develop a pulmonary edema, which is deadly. Treatments include medical management, surgical replacement of the valve, and percutaneous balloon valvuloplasty. We don’t have enough money to make all these, and all these complications are because of the dialysis she does, that only worsens things. Not to mention that her parathyroid activity led in deposition of calcium all over her body in the last few months, and now she has to undergo surgery to remove the parathyroid gland, otherwise the calcium taken from her very own bones would deposit on any organ. We’ll use part of the money you people donated until now to make the scintigraphy before the operation and the operation itself, very soon. She isn’t able to sleep anymore, she can hardly fall asleep one or two hours a night, coughs all the time.

This is my mom, Mary.

She’s a painter. She’s the best mom in the world: kind heart, the most beautiful soul I have ever seen.

We have all had a happy life until both her kidneys have failed (December 2003). This is a picture taken in the summer of 2003 (before she got ill). Since then, it’s nothing but pain and regrets for all the things not done in life for her and everyone else around her.

Every time I talk to her on the phone she tells me how horrible it is in the dialysis sessions she attends three times a week (on Monday, Wednesday and Friday). She has to travel 80 miles on each one of these days, and the road is bumpy as hell.

Do you know what dialysis is? The dialysis machine extracts all the blood from the patient’s veins, passes it through a filter, extracts and inserts certain chemicals into it, to stabilize its components and then it pours the cleaner blood back into her body.