News Item: : Deo Gratias!
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
Posted by admin
Monday 27 February 2017 - 21:06:40

By God's grace, Mum is home with us again; and even celebrating her 71st birthday with a cake!

Dear readers,

Thank you so very much for all your prayers and for checking by here each day for news. Thanks, too, to those who have sent kind and supportive e-mails. 

Please forgive our delay in posting anything here, but we have been through a rather harrowing few days.

We see from the internet that other Catholic folks experienced the night of last Thursday into Friday as something of a weird time of spiritual warfare.

Thursday morning had been grim enough here with the batterings of ''Storm Doris'' ripping drainpipes, roof tiles and fences from local homes. The round-up of news from Rome also seemed to bring with it a particular darkness that day. The whole of that night was oppressive.

At 4:45am on Friday, I was lying awake when I suddenly heard Mum screaming out a long, loud and terrifying scream from her room. In fact, this was amplified in stereo by the fact that we have a baby-monitor next to our bed and linked through to Mum's room.

Regular readers will recall that Mum suffered a stroke in the late summer of 2014, which wiped most of her memory and speech; as well as leaving her in need of 24/7 care.

In recent months, Mum has been experiencing ''choking'' bouts, mainly at night, due to the post-stroke failure to swallow consistently. In the daytime, we are there to remind her to swallow, but during the night, saliva can build up and then cause a gag reflex which makes Mum begin to panic and choke. The baby monitor wakens us when this happens and we run in to assist her. (I should add that Mum has a hospital-style bed with an elevated headrest to keep her as safe as possible).

When I got to Mum after her dreadful scream in the early hours of Friday morning, she was clutching her head with both hands, tilting her head far back and displaying an expression of agony on her face.

She then went through a very frightening period of about 20 minutes, which included symptoms of seizure followed by very abnormal breathing. In all that time, she could not see us and her eyes were going from left to right and back constantly. To be honest the experience was quite terrifying and I put Holy Water on Mum's face and head. Her breathing became so bad and rattling that we feared for her life.

We rapidly called both our priest confessor and an ambulance.

God bless him, our spiritual director was stood in full black clerical attire - plus maroon house slippers! - when I pulled up to his front door about 20 minutes later. He got in the car and we sped back for him to give Mum Extreme Unction.

Minutes before Father and I arrived back home, Mum had begun to come back to recognizing Angie and breathing more easily. At the point when Father began leading the Our Father, Mum looked up and gave a gentle smile. That gave us some peace.

On a lighthearted note, as we crossed to the ambulance we came across a bright pink and white woman's fluffy slipper in the driveway. It was not Mum's or Angie's. Sometimes things like this give you a bit of a laugh in the midst of emergencies and we speculated that it must have been dropped ''twister-style'' by Storm Doris! Over the weekend, we discovered that it actually belonged to a local lady who had hung it out on a ledge to dry during the high winds of the storm; she and said slipper are now happily reunited!

The staff at the hospital were great and Mum had to go through all the usual observations and tests. We were told that this could have been a seizure which afflicts some people after a stroke. The time lapse from the stroke to now seemed long to us, but we were very grateful when Mum was discharged to come back home with us.

Mum has slept a great deal since returning home, but she was able to have a bit of birthday cake to celebrate the fact that Saturday was her 71st birthday.

So, thanks again for all the prayers. We are so grateful to God for sparing Mum and for the fact that she recognizes us and is breathing normally again. By God's grace, we are all back now and catching up with a few days worth of the news...

Our Lady of Lourdes and St. Joseph - Pray for us!

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This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1565 )