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!

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:

So, because of a malfunction of the parathyroid glands (near the thyroid), and through a complicated chemical process I partly understand, the calcium from my mother’s bones has been disengaging from the bone structures and depositing onto her soft tissues (joints and muscles). That’s the cause of her fingers being “frozen” last winter and spring, when their tips effectively turned into dead meat, because of the poor circulation the calcium deposition had caused.

Nobody knew (at least I didn’t) anything about this complication, since the “good” doctor at the hospitals she had been never told her anything about that, until she did that ecographic scan in July, that revealed her heart’s valves had been covered with calcium.

I got married in August. At my wedding my mother could walk decently, could move freely. After three weeks, she could barely get on her feet, her muscles had stiffened and swollen, and she couldn’t climb the 5 stairs she had to climb to get home, if she hadn’t been helped.

So, I googled for medicine for her condition and found there actually is something that could alleviate her state: Mimpara (or Cinacalcet). The only problem was that the medicine costs $280 (29 pills), so we had second thoughts about buying it, discouraged earlier by the same doctors who said it wouldn’t do any good to her.

Now, determined by her state, we decided to buy that medicine from the money you people donated (thanks a lot for that). We bought the rare medicine (only released on the market in 2006), and without the doctor knowing, following the prescription on the leaflet, she took it. In two weeks my mother could walk again, her muscles came back to normal, and the calcium was not a problem anymore.

High fever was another problem she had to deal with. Again, the “good” doctor gave her the wrong antibiotic, without taking her any analysis so to know whether her body accepts it or not, and each time there were allergic reactions to it, but she continued to administer that antibiotic to my mother regardless of her complaints.

One day, (it was a Wednesday), I remember she got to the hospital in Lugoj to attend the dialysis and she was happy that nothing troubled her anymore, the fever had disappeared. I thought it was a new beginning for her. At the end of that dialysis session, the doctor decided it was time for a last dose of antibiotic.

While the dose had been pouring through her veins, she felt her feet and hands getting unbearably hot, like a thousand wasps stung her.

That night her feet and hands turned violet, like she had been beaten, and the burn continued. My father brought her to Timisoara and we took her to the Emergency Room, from where she had been transported to the dialysis section, though didn’t seem to have mattered the problem was more in the dermatological field.

What followed is from horror movies: big bleeding wounds, huge pains, the skin began to fall off her feet and hands, where naked flesh took its place. In the meanwhile, we interned her at a dermatology clinic, where she stood about two weeks. She had pains I could barely stand just by seeing her. The only way she could walk was the wheelchair.

Now, at almost two months after that, with the help of the great doctors from the new dialysis center we took her, and some silver bandages (Calgitrol), her feet begin to give signs of improving and we hope that by Christmas she would walk again without any problem.

One problem led to another, and now her heart and lung’s tissue are filled with water, as we saw in an X-ray picture made a couple of days ago. She has to get on her feet really well, unless she wants to have the transplant made.

I asked the doctor from the new clinic (Braun) to make an approximate estimation of her healing chances and she said by summer next year she could be in the state for a transplant, but until then we have to find the money and the donor.

In the meanwhile we have purchased another Mimpara, because the bones’ decalcification began again. Mimpara is only a temporary solution, she still has to attend another smaller surgery to remove the sick parathyroid glands that cause the calcium disorder. She has had a scheduling for the surgery in Bucharest on October 15, but she couldn’t go in the condition she was at that time, with those wounds on her feet. Possible infections could have been fatal.

So, this is the latest update on my mother’s health. As I have said, your money have helped a lot, but we need, as far as I understood, somewhere around 30,000 euros to get it done properly.

With all that in mind, if you want to donate, we are more than grateful. Please use the donation button in the sidebar and help us help my mother. We are also putting dime by dime for her transplant from what we earn, but that’s far from enough – we need so much more.
Thank you for your patience reading this article and for your good thoughts!

Ovidiu Sandru.

The thing is my mother’s condition can be cured! Her heart can still recover, her calcium can rise in the bones and… her kidneys can be replaced! But I don’t have the money to do that, my dear friends! I don’t have the resources to keep my mother alive that much so she can see my future children! Please help us… donate as much as you can afford to, please help me save my mother! I promise, I swear I will do my best to use that money and make her healthy again!

If you own a blog or a site, and have a decent audience, please include a donation form along with an explanation… not for me, but for my mother! She deserves to live and see her grandchildren growing! Please! If you can afford a Wii or a jewelery, or something you’ll never use, please so much consider donating your money to my mother… I don’t know what to do anymore… I know I might be pathetic in some eyes, but I really don’t care. If you were in my place, you’d do the same, I guess.

I know you worked for that money. If you saw her laying down the street and knew her story, wouldn’t you work your efforts with me to help her get up? Give her a little of your work, and God will surely keep a record of your action.

In the worst case in which you really don’t have any money to give, please at lease pass this link to a friend…

The donation button is at the bottom of the page. Please, save my mother’s life through it!

 

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.

Imagine her kidneys aren’t able to process anything anymore. Imagine two needles being stuck into your hands three days a week, four hours a day, that is 12 hours a week!

Recently we suspect she has water in the lungs, because she’s having pains under her chest. That, added to the hypertension and weakening, is the result of the poor dialysis she is having.

The only way my mother can recover is a kidney transplant.

I want as many people as possible to see this page, and, if among them, there’s someone able to do the most wonderful thing in their life, has the money, and wants to save her from the slow but sure decline (did I mention she’s 52?), and help her live another 20 or 30 years, please use the donation button below.

I want to help my mother regain her happiness and let her get away from the hospital! She doesn’t have much autonomy, she’s trapped there, balancing between home and dialysis. You can also call her (she only speaks French – +40744236128), if you want to tell her anything. Or you can call me at +40744440684 for any other information – I will gladly talk to anyone interested in her state.

I don’t know what else I could do, except requesting a donation, since we don’t have enough money to find a donor and pay the doctors for the transplant! I feel like crying when I see others spending thousands of dollars on some costume or party, and my mom fading slowly, because she doesn’t even have 1% of that money for the transplant.

I don’t know the exact sum we need: 15,000 to 20,000 euros, approximately.

Help my mom if you can… please…

Click the button below and add your contribution for the best mother in the world!

All you people who donate are our friends, and you’ll be kept updated on my mother’s status once we begin the transplant procedures, so you won’t miss a thing and will feel the joy of having done something really wonderful!

Save a life!

Do some good ! I’m sure you’ll be fully rewarded ! God bless you!

p.s. If you can’t give money, at least please pass along the link to this page to someone who you know can give! Please help with that much. Thank you!