Excuse the rambling post, but my head feels as though it is about to implode.
We were away over Christmas and NY (Oman, staying with friends, unreal holiday). Spoke to my mum on New Year's Day - she had a bad cold but was otherwise ok. The next day we went camping in the desert, so were completely uncontactable until the 4th. As we drove back I turned my phone on to find various rambling messages about my mum. Finally, I managed to get through to my brother and found that my mum was now in intensive care. Fortunately, we were flying home that night anyway - so I went straight from Heathrow to the hospital. And I've been there every day since. Mum was heavily sedated and on a ventilator - she'd burst her lung through coughing and the other lung had collapsed - but still in a terribly distressed state. Spent the first two days trying to stop her pulling her ventilator out. Then they operated on her lung to seal the holes. She made it through the operation but the surgeon found her lungs were in a terrible condition - turns out her "asthma" is really emphysema, but then that's probably not something you admit to your family when you are a heavy smoker who has tried everything, including Zyban, to give up but, actually, don't really want to stop. Plus she had double pneumonia. Plus she had another infection.
For about five days she was out cold - heavily sedated, ventilated and, at one point, on dialysis because her kidneys failed too. (They seem to be working again, but who knows what's around the corner.)
Now, nearly two weeks after being taken ill, she is still in intensive care, still on a ventilator, still not free of pneumonia or the other infection and still in a terrible state. She is now conscious - well, kind of. She's very confused and, I imagine, absolutely terrified. I know I am.
Yesterday, because she'd had been intubated for so long and was having such a dreadful time coping with the tube going through her mouth, they did a tracheotomy - so now she has a sodding tube going into her neck to make sure she can breathe. Supposedly, it's temporary. I bloody hope so - apart from anything else, she's not the sort of woman to enjoy doing Darth Vader impersonations. Not that she can even do that yet, she still doesn't even have the strength to breathe, let alone speak - and that's getting to her too, understandably. To be honest, she was in a foul mood today - annoyed that we couldn't understand what she was trying to say (she can't write anything yet - she's too weak plus she has such dreadful odoema that she can't really hold a pen as her hands are too puffed up) annoyed that I wouldn't let her guzzle down glasses of water (because if she drinks too much, too quickly, she'll be sick. Not a good idea when there's half a yard of garden hose down your throat.)
I understand that this is all part of the "healing" process - if she wasn't getting upset and depressed it would be more worrying - but it is so hard to see her going through all this. I know that she is making small improvements in the right direction - but she is still so terribly ill that I can't relax for a second or take any strength from these tiny steps. Everything happened so fast two weeks ago and I'm just petrified that she'll get another infection or something. (Die, I suppose.) She's only 64 - and she's a massive part of my life. We are best mates and I'm terrified for her (and for me) that if she does make it through all this that she will be a pale shadow of the person she used to be - hooked up to a bloody oxygen tank or worse.
I'm spending all "school hours" at the hospital. I'm not alone - my lovely step-father is there as are my aunt and uncle. Plus my brother, sisters and step-sister are in and out too. We kind of have this shift system going where we take it in turns to sit with her. But I daren't voice my worries to them, least of all my step-father who would be lost without my mum. So I'm going to put them here - if that's ok with you lot.