Last Tuesday, my mother had a stroke.
Part 1: Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
Your first question is my first question: will she be OK?
And to us both I say, “I don’t know.”
I haven’t been talking about it, not publicly. It seems a lot to say aloud, and I gave myself the room to be quiet.
For a while.
She was supposed to have knee surgery on Wednesday, the next day, when my father heard her call out from the kitchen. He rushed in to find her gripping the sink as the world frantically spun around her.
He caught her just before she fell.
There she was, lying on the narrow strip of floor in the galley kitchen of their lovely condo, when I called my Dad as a matter of habit, amused by something I was going to tell him, my words forever unsaid when I heard the tone of his voice.
“Mom may be having a migraine,” and then, after the silence, “I think I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“I don’t think it’s a migraine,” I replied. She was off her blood thinners.
For the surgery.
Which never was, and will likely never be.
I will spare you the agony of waiting that time did not spare us. We are told it was a “mild” stroke. But “mild” is incongruous with…
