Seven years ago today was a Tuesday. October 16, 2018, to be exact.
I didn't hear anything from my sister regarding Mom or Mom's condition that day. I might have been led to believe that Mom's condition may have improved from what it was the day before. Of course, I had no reason to think that her condition had worsened. I was definitely of the mindset that no news was good news, so I didn't think much of it. I figured that she was still very much on the road to recovery, just as she had been since August, when she left the house by ambulance. There was no reason to think that her condition had worsened.
Mom had been hospitalized before August 2018. I'm guessing here, but I want to say that her last hospitalization prior to 2018 had taken place in 2014. I believe that year, Mom was having some circulatory issues, which resulted in her having a blood clot in one of her legs. This was scary for Mom, being that she did not have a history of blood clots. She didn't know what this sort of thing would entail and she sure as hell didn't know what recovery would be like. She was prescribed a blood thinner and eventually, she would return home and she'd go about life, like nothing happened.
I had eventually started to equate Mom's hospitalizations to being very similar to when 2Pac would get shot in the 1990's. I never once thought that 2Pac was ever going to die, at least not be gunshot, with all the shootings that he endured because he always managed to survive. I don't think anyone truly believed that 2Pac was going to die from any kind of gunshot or bullet wound, with as many shootings as he survived. I don't know how many times Mom was hospitalized for something, but there was never a thought in my head where I thought that she was not going to not make it. 2Pac gets shot and survives. Mom goes to the hospital for a few days and then she goes back home. For a brief moment in time, that was life and that's how things were.
2Pac would end dying in the exact same way that I never thought he would have. A bullet got him and just like that, he was gone. Mom wouldn't be shot and killed or anything like that, but soon, perhaps as was the case with 2Pac, Mom's luck would eventually run out. Maybe she was on borrowed time and we just never knew it?
I guess the thought was that if she wasn't showing any symptoms of anything being wrong with her, she had to be progressing in the right direction. In that regard, we had nothing to worry about because no one saw it. Sure, she made the claim the day before that she was dying, but we didn't what she really meant when she said that. Maybe she was being dramatic? Maybe she was just overestimating her pain that day? Maybe she was genuinely dying and she could feel it?
I've always believed that the human body has its moments of resiliency, and it does, but I am also well aware that the body can also break down when the conditions for such a breakdown are just right. Sometimes this breakdown can be reversed and the body can be healed. Sometimes the breakdown progresses way too far to where there is no turning back, the body's deterioration runs its course, and the body can no longer continue to fight and it finally gives up.
At least on this day back in 2018, everything looked to be all right and we still believed that Mom was slowly, but surely, getting better.
Optimism and hope being what they are, we had no reason to assume otherwise.
Mom was going to get better, because we thought that she wasn't getting any worse.
This day, as we would later learn, was indeed the quiet before the storm.
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