Reading through this thread has helped lift my spirits. Thank you @rosemow for creating it.
This past week has been very stressful and painful for my family and me. Exactly a week ago around this exact time, my step-mother went to sleep. Little did we know it would be a permanent sleep. She had a stroke while she was sleeping and slipped into a coma. On Sunday, after she had been asleep for over 12 hours, my dad and younger sister got worried. It's not like my stepmom to sleep that long. They tried waking her and couldn't get her to wake up so they called the ambulance.
When she arrived at the ER, her blood pressure was 242/161 (no that is not a typo). The nurse said she had never seen a blood pressure that high before. They immediately started her on meds to lower it and that part did work. They ran all kinds of tests while we waited and waited. Around midnight, a doctor came in and sat down with us. She told us there was no hope. My step-mom's kidneys were shutting down, she was bleeding from her brain stem, and she would never wake up. We huddled in a group and held each other and cried.
The next few days we watched her sleep, praying for a miracle. We desperately wanted her to wake up. She did open her eyes one time and looked at my little sister, but the doctor said that was just a reaction to them touching the part of her brain that was bleeding. Still we hoped.
Early Thursday morning we got the call that she has passed. I met my dad, sister, and brother at the hospital and we said our goodbyes. It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to endure in my life. It brought back those awful memories of when I lost my own mother when I was a small child. My heart was breaking for my brother and sister, knowing we now shared one more common bond... we had all lost our mothers. My poor dad lost yet another wife and my older sisters and I lost the woman who tried to be a mom to us after we lost our own.
