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Hey everyone,
Thank you all for being loyal followers of this fic. And I want you to know that I don't plan on abandoning it, but...it's hard.
As some of you may know from a past author's note, my mother suffered a severe traumatic brain injury back at the beginning of 2021. I wrote the first couple chapters of this story when she was in ICU and the hospital for the first 17 days and I wasn't allowed to go see her because though she was asymptomatic she had tested covid positive and isolation protocols at hospitals were super strict back then. (Isolation was anywhere between 17-20 days). For the first week and half of that my mother was unresponsive and in a coma. I began writing this story as a much needed distraction from the hell that was my life. Eventually she woke up and was released from the ICU and into a long term acute care facility before being transferred to a skilled nursing facility.
My mother, my rock, the woman who had kept me sane through all of my mental and emotional health problems, who knew and understood like no one else close to me because she had gone through the exact same thing and more when she was my age. She was my best friend, the person who I would gladly lay down my life for and loved more than anything in the world, and after injury she didn't know who I was. She knew she knew me, but didn't know I was her daughter or my name. But...but that was okay. Because if I had to become her friend all over again, start fresh from a blank slate, I would. It didn't matter to me that she didn't remember how to talk, and was slowly relearning words, that she could no longer walk and got confused easily. She's my mom. And I'd be by her side as often as I was physically able to be.
Her path to recovery, like most brain injuries, was long and winding, filled with hills and valleys and incredibly unpredictable. She developed a seizure disorder and ended up having hallucinations and delusions. But she also eventually regained her ability to speak (thanks to speech therapy) and remembered who I was, most of the time. Unfortunately she wasn't cognitively able or ready to participate in physical therapy yet (they tried many times). The only things she was able to understand when we tried was that it hurt and was uncomfortable. She didn't have the processing ability to understand the benefits that it would allow her to walk on her own again with a walker (and it 100% would have. The pt's said that she had the most potential of anyone in the entire facility and absolutely had the physical strength that if she was able to participate and put effort into it would probably be up and walking again in 2-3 weeks).
All of my free time over 2021 was pretty much devoted to visiting her. To spending time with her and trying to help her exercise her mind in anyway I could think of, or just talking to her, or sitting in companionable silence by her bedside when she was too tired and needed to sleep. It was around this time (August 2021) that I was looking for apartments. I needed to get the hell out of the house I had lived in with my parents for my own sanity. My dad is not an easy person to live with, the only reason I hadn't moved out before was because I couldn't abandon my mother to be stuck dealing with him alone. However, after a couple months her inability to participate in physical therapy meant that the insurance company viewed her as "maintaining status", as in no-longer improving or going to improve (which is stupid because she was absolultely getting better cognitively progress was just very very slow), so she had to be transferred out of skilled nursing and into a nursing home.
It was then (about November) that I started to break. Up until that point, I had been handling everything. I made all trips to hospital whenever she was admitted randomly for feeding tube problems, pneumonia, seizures, CSF fluid pooling in her brain, needing to get the missing half of her skull put back in, etc. I was the one that talked to all of her doctors, made any medical decisions, filled out any paperwork, made them aware of her extensive medical history (which was already a damn textbook of information before the accident...seriously they do not put enough space on hospital/doctor admit forms for prior medical conditions, or family history). I wad also handling the entire thing financially. Managing a gofundme, trying to pay off the medical bills in a way that would keep collectors off the phone and hopefully keep my mother and father out of bankruptcy. It was when the skilled nursing home called me to tell me that not only did they need a check for $10k by the end of the week, and that they were basically going to kick her out because she wasn't making enough progress that I finally broke. I was having another panic attack and my thoughts were going to very dark places that I had managed to keep away from (thanks to my mom and fuck ton of therapy and medication) for about 6 years. In the middle of my mind and will to live fracturing into a gazillion little pieces I managed to call my Aunt. Who left work and came to find me. She talked me through everything and explained to me that it wasn't my responsibility to keep my dad from going bankrupt. That it was his responsibility to deal with the financial stuff and he should've been the one to step up and take care of it from the get go. So she has a talk with my dad and he actually did end up taking over the financial stuff to my relief (with the exception of the gofundme which I had to shut down as we were going to need to start looking for qualifying for medicaid for the nursing home). I still handled all mom's medical stuff since dad doesn't really understand or remember all of the details where as I do, and it's a skill I've mastered to point where anytime I'm the designated family member by the hospital bedside I always get the questions "Are you a nurse?" Or "What field of medicine are you in?" Then, when I tell them "I'm not, but that I have taken a lot of classes for it (back when I was originally planning to be a pediatrician then redirected to child psychologist) until unfortunately my mental health took a turn for worse and basically made it impossible for me to be in a classroom setting anymore", I usually get the responses of "That's unfortunate. You would make a great nurse." Or that I should look into online nursing schools. ...God that was a tangent that got off track. The point is that from that point forward I was only in charge of anything on the medical side of mom's recovery.
Mom was moved to the nursing home where she took a bit of a downturn before slowly getting better again. Just before Christmas, I got lucky. My boss (I work full time at a small family owned Italian grocery store, which means I was considered "essential" and working all through covid and my mom's recovery with the exception of the 17 days in ICU and any other of the times she was hospitalized) manages several apartments in the area and one opened up and would be ready at the end of January. I looked at it, said 'Yes. Yes. Please! Thank you so much!", and started furnishing it February 1st and moved in on the 15th. Living there and on my own had and continues to be incredibly good for my mental health.
And at the end of February, around my mother's birthday I got another phenomenal gift. Some sort of important synapses in mom's brain must have healed, because MOM was THERE. Her cognition suddenly increased, her memory and awareness improved, and her personality was back. She was pissed because the doc at the nursing home mentioned she had a stroke, but wouldn't tell her what kind. In her words as she vented to me, "There are several different kinds of stroke. I think it's important for me to know and understand what kind I had so I know what to expect when it comes to my health and healing down the road. At the very least you as my daughter should be told everything that's going on and all the details." And I cried. My mom was BACK, the same one who was always insistent on understanding the intracies and details of any medical condition she or someone she loves had and who, when I was a kid, would read random things to me from medical encyclopedias we had on the bookshelf (not because she was in a medical profession, she wasn't...she didn't even graduate from highschool but dropped out and got her GED so she could get a job to help support her struggling family...rather she had them because she was facinated by the human body and brain and always had a desire to learn and know more). When I finally stopped crying, her of course comforting me, I told her that I did know all the detials of her "stroke", and that if she wanted I could tell them to her. She agreed eagerly and so I told her everything that had happpened from accident when I first found her at the bottom of the stairs to present. Every nitty gritty detail, including how I had told her this before (in an effort to explain things like why she wasn't allowed to get out of bed on her own) but it had never stuck because up until this point she had experienced short term memory problems (and long term in some cases). When I mentioned how she had been having hallucinations and delusions, she even had the presence of thought to agree with me that she had been having quite a bit of delirium and described to me how she had been talking to a hallucination of two of her former bosses when midway into the conversation she realized "something wasn't quite right and they just faded away". She also talked about how she had trouble distinguishing what was real and not and was trying, but didn't feel comfortable asking the nursing home staff because they looked at her like she was crazy. I was overjoyed. Not only was her personality suddenly back, and her higher thought processes (understanding cause and effect, and long term consequences) back, but her hallucinations and delusions were improving to if she was starting to be able to tell or at least question when something wasn't real. I encouraged her to ask the nurses anyway and just ignore their opinion, and if they really look at her oddly just explain to them that she's trying to determine whether something is real or a hallucination so she knows whether to ignore it or not. I then did a physical evaluation and was surprised to see that over the course of a week her left arm (which she had only been able to lift maybe 4 or five inches off the bed) had regrained quite a bit of strength and she was now able to lift it about a foot and a half off the bed. Her grip strength was improving too and she seemed to cognitively understand and remember what physical therapy was and said she was willing to do it. I started her off with hand and arm exercises to do in bed while I would research possible physical therapy options and then sat back and simply talked. Caught her up with things going on in my life, about the apartment and how I was still trying to furnish it. How I had a bed, dresser, kitchen table and not much else. She mentioned seeing lovesac commercials on TV as something I'd like for a couch, and I told her how I had already looked into them and they were supposed to be super comfy but they were way out of my price range. To which mom pulled a mom and made me tear up again because she did something so very her, and said "It's your first apartment. It may take some creative financing and we may have to scrimp in other areas but if you really want it I'm sure I can figure something out." Before she winked at me. She fucking winked at me and smiled a smile that was just so very mom that I broke down cried again before telling her how much I loved her before I had to leave for the night (it was way past visiting hours at this point, but like hell would anybody have been able to kick me out before then).
So things were looking up. Mom's cognition and strength (she was able to lift her arm above her head!) and short term memory continued to improve throughout the last week of February and first couple weeks of March, the everything went to hell again. She had a breakthrough seizure (what they call a seizure that happens when a person has been seizure free for a significant period of time, usually because they're being controlled by medications) that sent her to ER. Then just after she had been moved to a hospital room she had another seizure (thankfully I was at her bedside and noticed the early signs). The second one lasted so long and wasn't stopping with medication so she had to be rushed to ICU. It lasted an hour (55 minutes to be exact). When she came out her post-ictal state a day and a half later all her progress was gone. She couldn't move her left side again, didn't know who I was or where she was and the hallucinations/delusions were back in full swing. Once she was deemed stable she was moved back to nursing home, however she was loaded right back onto the transport ambulance when she started vomiting randomly. She was readmitted back to the hospital where it was a few days before the probably finally got bad enough that they were able to see it. She had an infection that had been hiding from CT scans and growing in the dead bone of her replaced skull where her immune system couldn't reach/fight. It grew to push on and cover part of her brain and was tracking down her cheek (which is what caused them to do an MRI and find it). I was told that if she didn't get emergency treatment she would die probably within the week as she was becoming increasingly less responsive. I agreed to the emergency surgery.
The surgery was successful and mom was eventually discharged with IV antibiotics that had to be administered by the nursing home, but cognitively and personality wise she never came back. Around mother's day I went in to tell her the good news (even if she couldn't understand it) that her most recent scans and blood work showed the infection all clear and she could come off the antibiotics as scheduled. But then I saw her face. I could read the message in her eyes. we'd always been able to communicate silently with each other. Just a series of looks back at forth were enough for a secret conversation if dad was around or when one of us didn't feel like talking outloud. For the couple minutes that mom was awake when I walked into the room, she told me without words that she was done. That she was tired of fighting and just wanted to sleep. I told her it was okay, that I understood, that I love her no matter what and always would and then I went and sat down in the seat and quietly sobbed while she slept. Later that week she was sent to the ER twice with random bouts of vomiting that they could find no apparent cause for. Two days later she vomited again and ended up aspirating. I gave them permission to intubate her as long as they followed the DNR that I had had set up after the emergency brain surgery for the infection. Three days later I (with my dad's agreement), had to make the call to remove the intubation. She shockingly was breathing on her own but was still unresponsive, completely unaware, and fading and was put on hospice. They didn't expecg her to make it through the nect couple days. However she was stronger even at that point than anyone anticipated and held on long enough that the hospital basically told us that she would need to be discharged (because it was taking her too long to die). I couldn't stand the thought of her dying in the nursing home (especially since only one person could be with her at a time and only during visiting hours meaning I would have to leave at night and she might end up dieing alone), and my parents house wasn't a feasible option (hoarding level problems that have gotten significantly worse since my mom's accident), so she was discharged and moved to my apartment.
At my apartment she held on for another week, until she passed away on May 20th. It's still not real to me most of the time. And for the most part I try to distract myself from it and not sit quietly with my thoughts too much. When I do I start to spiral and it's not good. So I'm pushing forward. I'm trying to live my life by the motto "what would mom do?", trying to live in a way that would make her smile and happy to see the person I've become, that I'm slowly turning into. Some days are more of a struggle than others, and honestly fanfic is a great distraction (especially since I can't seem to watch many TV shows or movies without thinking about what she would like to watch, what we watched/binged together, or having a character do something motherly that reminds me of her and leads to me crying until I'm exhausted).
So yeah, this fic is officially on a temporary hiatus. I do plan on finishing it, and actually am trying to write it when motivation hits me, but it's hard. Especially Inko. So much of what I plan to turn Inko into and her and Izuku's interactions is based on my mom and the things she did for me. And while I could do the opposite and turn it into an abusive/neglectful Inko fic and have less trouble writing that emotionally than writing a mother who actually cares, I don't want to. I want to stay true to that vision I initially had when my mom's accident first happened and I needed the distraction. I want to finish writing the story she smiled at as I was reading it to her in the hospital and skilled nursing facility (even if at times she did't understand what was going on). I will finish it. It's just going to take time.