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: My best friend; My Mother

by Dkscott5391

Where do I start when I talk about my mother and I? We had a special relationship.

Our road was never an easy one. Through the years our relationship has been both very good and very bad. Any one who knows us knows that my mom left us on more than one occasion to chase some dream, or to move to some other state. She drank to much, mostly resulting in her disease that eventually killed her.

When she wasn't drinking she was your best friend, always there to help when someone was sick in the hospital, or troubled with something, she did a great deal to help take care of her mother when she was sick and mom and I were there when she passed away, little did I know that just 5 years later I would have to watch mom die.

It is a very awing experience to watch someone leave this life. It wasn't what I expected, it was quiet, peaceful and when she breathed her last she had a smile on her face -- the first after weeks of torment.

Mom was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver January of 1998. By April of 98 they were only giving her a few months to live, so I moved her from Austin to Dallas to live with us in May, not realizing that at the time I was already pregnant with our second child. She lived with us for about a year and got her own apartment in Garland. She lived there a little over a year, her health just riding a fine line between livable to miserable.

There were countless trips to the doctor and hospital, gradually it got more to where she could not drive herself any where, her eyes and memory failing because of ammonia levels being high in her brain from the liver failure. In August mom was getting much worse much faster than before and after a blood test her doctor called me at work and told me to get mom to the hospital as soon as possible because her kidneys were in failure. I never dreamed that was the beginning of the end.

Three days after we arrived at the hospital things became much more grave. Shortly after Greg arrived mom slipped into a coma, she was having breathing difficulties and the doctors along with the family persuaded me to allow them to put mom on a respirator to allow some medication to reverse the problem. No one thought she would make it. I walked in the room and there she was, hooked up to every machine you can name, part of my heart died right then. But to everyone's surprise she pulled through the coma.

In a few days she was out of ICU and in a regular room. The first thing she wanted to do was smoke. The first time we went out everything was fine, but the last time I took her out was different.