A Heroic Mother

The following came from a medical newsletter I get each week.

A MEDICAL MYSTERY AND A MOTHER’S GIFT OF LIFE

What We Discovered Changed Everything For Me And My Father…

By Marilyn Holasek Lloyd

My family understands how much Christmas means to me because I am reminded every year of the greatest gift I have ever received.

I was born in 1946 and was therefore a post-war baby boomer. I learned from my father many years later that when I was about two months old, he and my mother were watching me sleep, and my mother had said, "When Marilyn smiles at me, she repays me for everything a mother goes through." With that, she turned to my father and said, "I don’t feel well." He told her to lie down and rest, but she began foaming at the mouth and she died. For most of his life, my father felt that he perhaps could have done something that might have helped to save her. He lived with this heavy burden.

I was always told my mother died of a heart attack. And that perhaps my mother’s rheumatic fever that she had contracted in her childhood had hastened her death. But those facts never computed when I became a nurse because, for one thing, heart attack victims do not foam at the mouth.

Some medical history backtracking and conversations with medical personnel led to a series of discoveries and what we found out changed everything for me and my father: Apparently, after my mother died, the doctor said that my mother’s rheumatic fever in childhood had greatly affected her heart. And the doctor said he was so concerned about my mother while she was pregnant that he sent her to a cardiologist. My mother didn’t want to worry my father and never told him. Her doctor believed that she died from very sudden heart failure. In other words, her heart just gave out, and it couldn’t pump and she died.

I couldn’t wait to tell my father the facts, because he had to know that there wasn’t anything anyone probably could have done to save my mother. I was just so thankful my father found this out before he died.

And in the following years, I also pieced together more medical facts. My mother could have also died of a blown mitral valve. In any case, her heart was so damaged that in this day and age she would have likely needed either a valve replacement or a heart transplant.

The stunning part of the story is that she lived through the pregnancy and delivery. My husband, a doctor, always has said that the biggest strain on the heart occurs at seven months of pregnancy and at the delivery. Furthermore, my mother continued to work in the family grocery store right up to the time she went into the hospital.

After finding out the facts surrounding my mother’s death, I was never the same. I knew that my mother sacrificed herself so I could be born. She knew the risks and yet wanted a child. I have therefore felt a tremendous responsibility to live my life so that my mother’s gift would not be in vain. And I wanted children to pass her gift on to them.

As I contemplate these things at Christmas time, I am very thankful for my mother’s gift. I give thanks for her and my father everyday. And when my children were little, I glanced down on their cribs as they slept just as my parents watched me, and now I just glance up at their grown-up faces and say to myself, "They have the most beautiful smiles."