A moment that changed me: I found my mother unconscious on the bathroom floor
"After calling the ambulance and escorting Mom to the hospital, did we go back to bed?"
"No, we watched a movie."
This is a conversation I had with my sister a few weeks ago. That's when I realized, 12 years after the fact, that once we had faced the emergency of finding Mom unconscious on the bathroom floor, I had to to be in shock.
Like most spoiled teenagers returning from their first year of college, I thought I was going to spend a summer cooking meals, while my mother took over the laundry. I was wrong. And not because my lovely mom wouldn't do these things for me, but because she couldn't. She had collapsed, having spent the day in bed with a migraine.
Migraines weren't completely unusual for Mom, so we didn't think much of it until about midnight, when she went to the bathroom. There was a bang, then the sound of my dad running down the landing, forcing the bathroom door open and screaming for our help.
I remember vividly calling the ambulance; they had a lot of questions. Young readers won't necessarily understand this, but many homes back then had telephones connected to their walls by small wires. You couldn't get them out of the rooms they were in and ours, oddly, wasn't in the bathroom. So to get the operator's questions answered, I had to keep running to the landing to ask dad. Dad was pale and concentrating on getting mom to breathe.
I remember so clearly Dad saying, "Stop wasting time on these questions and just send the ambulance. ."
< p class="dcr-3jlghf">I remember so clearly walking up the main road, in my dressing gown and slippers, to signal for the ambulance to get down and drive away. head towards our hidden house at the back of a housing estate. .
"After calling the ambulance and escorting Mom to the hospital, did we go back to bed?"
"No, we watched a movie."
This is a conversation I had with my sister a few weeks ago. That's when I realized, 12 years after the fact, that once we had faced the emergency of finding Mom unconscious on the bathroom floor, I had to to be in shock.
Like most spoiled teenagers returning from their first year of college, I thought I was going to spend a summer cooking meals, while my mother took over the laundry. I was wrong. And not because my lovely mom wouldn't do these things for me, but because she couldn't. She had collapsed, having spent the day in bed with a migraine.
Migraines weren't completely unusual for Mom, so we didn't think much of it until about midnight, when she went to the bathroom. There was a bang, then the sound of my dad running down the landing, forcing the bathroom door open and screaming for our help.
I remember vividly calling the ambulance; they had a lot of questions. Young readers won't necessarily understand this, but many homes back then had telephones connected to their walls by small wires. You couldn't get them out of the rooms they were in and ours, oddly, wasn't in the bathroom. So to get the operator's questions answered, I had to keep running to the landing to ask dad. Dad was pale and concentrating on getting mom to breathe.
I remember so clearly Dad saying, "Stop wasting time on these questions and just send the ambulance. ."
< p class="dcr-3jlghf">I remember so clearly walking up the main road, in my dressing gown and slippers, to signal for the ambulance to get down and drive away. head towards our hidden house at the back of a housing estate. .What's Your Reaction?
