When I was growing up in southern California, my family all lived relatively close by. We gathered for holidays and family events; grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins from both sides of my family. It wasn’t unusual to have a house full of family. I was the first grandchild on my father’s side of the family and one of the older female grandchildren on my mother’s side, so I did a lot of babysitting. The only cousins who were my age were all males, but since I was a total Tomboy, that didn’t bother me. What did bother me was getting stuck with the babysitting. I only remember getting out of babysitting once to go fishing with my male cousins; I could only come along if I cleaned all the fish. I gladly did it for a few hours of salt air down at the beach. Cleaning fish sounded like child’s play compared to trying to control a houseful of wild cousins running all over the place, getting into things they shouldn’t, and doing things that they weren’t supposed to. I never knew how much my younger cousins looked up to me until I had grown up and moved away. Like most younger kids, my younger cousins looked to us older cousins as being cooler and having more freedom and being wiser. They envied us. I never knew that. I thought I just had more responsibility than they did, and wished I could play and run around and not be in charge. Many of my younger cousins say that I inspired them. I just thought I was doing what I was supposed to do.
Tomorrow my cousin, Sheila, is going into USC Medical Center for a second operation on her brain aneurysm. She had something called a basal tip aneurysm at the end of August. Apparently, when these type of aneurysms burst, there is a less than 1% survival rate and the vast majority of survivors have major problems afterwards. Sheila is a walking talking miracle. She spent 3 weeks in a coma and then had a stroke when the doctors were trying to help her with her aneurysm. That put her in ICU and from there she went into rehabilitation and then home. She was more tired than usual (what a surprise!), had some vision and speech problems, but she has steadily improved and if you didn’t know what had happened to her, you wouldn’t guess there was anything out of the ordinary going on in her life. She has kept her sense of humor and her faith in God through it all. She inspires me.
I had no idea that all of this happened until October—2 months after the fact. My once close family has been blown to the four winds. Sheila’s parents are gone, first her dad and then her mom 7 years ago. Her mother (who was my dad’s sister) died three days after my dad died. I remember getting the phone call from my step mom on a Friday and then later in the day a phone call from Sheila that her mom had a stroke and was in the hospital. On the following day, a Saturday, I drove the hour to go visit her in the hospital and she seemed to be doing okay. I fully expected her to be released from the hospital to go home. On Monday I got the phone call from Sheila that her mother had died. My once close family now lives everywhere from Maryland to Oregon and from Arizona to Montana and lots of places in between. My grandparent’s generation has passed on and my parent’s generation is a lot sparser. I still have some younger aunts and uncles left, but it is a strange feeling to become part of the older generation in my family. There are only a few of us left down here, which is why my cousin Sheila went through a brain aneurysm without much family support. Her daughter, Aubrey, was 23 and living with her mom when it happened. I don’t know how she got through all that. Nobody called me, because that was during the last 6 months of my mom’s life when I was going a little crazy trying to make sure my mother was getting the care she needed. From August to October we were dealing with hospitals, nursing homes, serious declines in my mother’s help and hiring of extra care for her. That was when I started traveling up to see her twice a month instead of once a month.
Now Sheila needs another surgery. She had this thing called coiling done a couple of days after her aneurysm burst at the end of August. Basically, the doctors go in through a vein in her groin and put a strand of surgical material into the aneurysm to stop the bleeding. The strand coils around itself and forms a clot. Apparently, when Sheila had an angiogram a month ago to get images of her brain, the doctors found that the original coiling compacted and her aneurysm is reforming. I am explaining this as it was explained to me, and I am not a doctor. The purpose of this new surgery is to do some preventative coiling. The risk is that she could have another stroke, a heart attack, clots, or even death. When you are a walking talking miracle like Sheila, when you have already dodged a major bullet, you worry that your luck has run out. You worry that all the hard rehabilitation work you did to come back to pretty darn close to where you were before all of this happened will be lost. You are scared.
This time I am going to be there when she wakes up. This time I am going to pick up Aubrey from her home and sit and wait in the hospital with her while her mom is having surgery. This time I will pray for another miracle.
Living Up to Mom 
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