Against all of our prayers, it looks like God has other plans with us than we ever thought.

My mother died on February 18, 2010, in the Emergency Room, while the doctors were trying to resuscitate her.

We were scheduled for a parathyroid surgery on the 18th.

The things went like this:

- On Tuesday, Feb. 16th, mom went to attend the regular dialysis sessions without any worry about other complications she might have had. Reaching the dialysis center, the nurses and the doctor found that her fistula had blocked, and sent her to the county hospital, in Timisoara.

- Once we reached the hospital, she had been taken into the dialysis department, and from there to the surgery room for the unblocking of the fistula. Even though at first the doctors only wanted to mount her a neck catheter for her to be able to attend the dialysis on Tuesday, they also did the surgical operation of unblocking the fistula.

- Everything went fine, she was put on dialysis for two and a half hours, and then transported into the saloon until Wednesday, when they had planned to release her (or so we thought).

- On Thursday morning, she called me at around 7:30am crying and saying to bring her some food because the breakfast did not arrive and though it had arrived, it would had only consisted of margarine and jam. In a hurry, I bought her some easy, fat-free food from the local shop and took it to the hospital. She enjoyed the meal and ate like she had never eaten in a month. Feeling happy that she is happy, I went on and headed to work.

- I only reached her in the evening, when she started accusing abdominal aches and short breaths, and I thought it was because of the extra pounds that she had put on since Saturday, when she was last dialysed (4.6 kg in excess to her weight). We called the doctor on duty, who examined her and told us everything was fine. My mother wasn’t feeling that bad after all, but she was rather weakened, and we thought it was because of the extra pounds.

- I left hospital and headed for home at around 9.30 pm.

- At 10.00 pm she called me again, crying to go there because she had abdominal pains and couldn’t breathe properly, and the doctor didn’t do anything about that.

- Once I reached hospital, I asked for explanations and all I was told was that I should get out of my mother’s saloon and “let them do their job”. I didn’t impede them with anything, but they acted like they were trying to stop me seeing what they actually did to her, which is kind of illegal.

- I followed all their orders. Both my mother and I begged the doctor to put her on dialysis to get some water out of her body, but she didn’t want to. Instead, she kept saying that we should keep her with her oxygen mask on, crying and screaming of pain.

- Finally, after almost two hours full of me insisting that she should be put on dialysis, the doctor finally reached the same conclusion, and connected her to the machine.

- She was dialysed from 23:45 to 1:45. In this interval, she had been vomiting and feeling bad, but at the end of the dialysis, although still weakened, she was ok.

- Feeling a little bit eased, I left mom in the hospital after she reinsured me she wouldn’t need me anymore until Thursday morning, and left home at 2am.

- At 5.43 I received a desperate phone call from her, telling me she had her belly pains again and told me to come as fast as I could, and once again telling me the doctors didn’t do anything to her since I left.

- After arguing with the doctor, she finally told me that my mother’s transaminases had been 1000, and that it could be an acute liver necrosis, based on the vasculitis she had.

- We took my mother to the E.R., where the doctor put her on an echo-scanner to see the liver. After taking her off the bed, and putting her in her chair, so we could take her to another set of analysis, a doctor from the E.R. saw us and asked my mother’s doctor where had we been taking her to.

- We then put mom on another table and they invited me out. Me and my family who in the meanwhile gathered outside waited for about five hours, while the E.R. doctors kept her connected to an external heart stimulator and then told us they would take her to the Intensive Care unit for further surveillance.

- At about 12:30 on Thursday, a nurse came to bring us my mother’s clothes. We kindly asked her how she had been doing, and she refused to talk to us, telling it was the doctors’ responsibility to tell us. Then, a second nurse brought her earrings and the wedding ring she was wearing. My father asked this second nurse the same thing, and at first she refused to talk to us. Then, after insisting, at the question: “is she alive anymore?”, she whispered: “no, she doesn’t live anymore”.

And that’s the way God took her from us. The verdict was that she developed a total heart block, following a cardio-respiratory stop. The high transaminase figure (almost 4000 at the second analysis) is explained by this, and not by the presumptive and false diagnosis of “liver necrosis”, that couldn’t have developed so quickly, in just one day.

So, my dear mother died. What can I say?

She was the best mother I could have ever had, and the most wonderful person the world. I’m saying this not because I’m her son, but because there were more than 100 people gathered at the funeral, only good words have been spoken of her, and even the priest cried when he read her obituary.

She painted the most wonderful paintings I’ve ever seen, and we’re going to open an exhibition (a non-sale one) in her loving memory.

She was always glad anytime I told her she had a new donation from this site and from greenoptimistic.com, no matter what the sum was.

All that money helped us prolong her life for as long as God wanted. We bought Mimpara, took her to treat her eye disease she developed since Christmas (because of the vasculitis she had and the huge parathyroid hormone).

There were two times that we had been scheduled for having a surgery to remove the parathyroid glands, and each of those times something happened that we couldn’t go – so I guess it’s fate, God… I don’t know.

All I know is that she’s among us now, and I really feel her. We will always have her in our hearts, hurt badly for the moment, but healed by the love she always gave to us.

During the last month of life, like she felt it, she organized all her paintings and drawings, finished them and dreamed of putting them together in an exhibition. She did that using only one eye… through the other one she could only see dark spots in the image, and the phenomenon expanded in the last days of life. But who would have thought she had a heart attack? I presume it happened on Monday, before she went to the hospital, when she had been accusing backaches…

I don’t want to accuse anyone, but the doctors didn’t do their job properly and due to their misunderstanding of her illness, she paid the price.

May she rest in peace, as she really was an angel among us.

This is her last picture, taken while she was having her last dialysis. I was counting the minutes she had left until the machine stopped, and then, feeling better, she went to her saloon. I left her at peace at the time… The plastic bottle there had warm coffee inside… she warmed her fragile little hands with it. I couldn’t find any hot water source in the entire hospital, and all I could get was a hot coffee from a vending machine. Which she also enjoyed drinking… her last sip of coffee which she enjoyed all her life.

I’m glad and also proud I could be with her in the latter hours of her 54 years of life. While I was rubbing her back that night, and then wiping her sweat, I told her: “see, mommy, you always wiped my back when I was little, and now I’m wiping yours…”… and she said: “Do you see? The wheel is always spinning…”

She saw me… I saw her… I kissed her goodbye, there, in the E.R., and I think she fell asleep when they invited me out. I like to think that I’m the last one she ever saw with her blue-greenish eyes… You never knew what color they were… when she wore blue, they were blue, when she wore green, they were green.

Her soul was as beautiful as her face. Seeing her dead didn’t recall me much of her. Then I realized her soulless body didn’t express even one percent of who she was when she lived.

She couldn’t drink much water and eat any banana during her 6 painful years of dialysis. If you read this, please do at least this for her: drink a full glass of water and eat a banana in her memory. Bananas have much potassium…

I love you, mom!

Uncategorized No Comments March 5th, 2010

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:

Uncategorized 4 Comments November 27th, 2009

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.

Uncategorized 1 Comment October 27th, 2009

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.

Uncategorized 11 Comments October 27th, 2009