At the start of Holy Week, the alarming news came from Singapore — my mother was suffering a stroke, after miraculously surviving a five-day brain aneurysm in 2011 against all odds, and had collapsed alone at home, as her left leg had ceased to function. My father, who had just recovered from a broken ankle, was overwhelmed with the hospital red tape due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Far away in Australia, all I could do was send out a prayer request. Thanks to Facebook, over 300 relatives, friends and strangers across the globe responded. They offered Masses and rosaries, in an amazing wave of support.
My mother spent Holy Week in a haze of medical examinations and soporifics. In a parallel to my father’s own stroke in 1998 (where a doctor dismissed his case as one of certain death, and my mother had him moved at my brother’s behest), on Holy Thursday he managed after great difficulty to have her transferred to a better hospital. There she received physiotherapy and was placed on appropriate medication to dissolve the clot in her brain. She was lucid and began to be in better spirits.
Two weeks later, she was discharged; a week after that, she began to walk again!
My father was very anxious about caring for her alone, as my brother could not visit often due to the coronavirus restrictions, and I was on another continent. Providence came via the neighbors, whose elderly father had just passed away; they offered to transfer his carer to my parents’ household, and she came with almost two decades of experience caring for the elderly. It would have been impossible for my father to find a new carer under the lockdown conditions; this was a great burden off his mind. At least there would be someone around with greater physical strength to support and watch over my mother.
My mother still has health issues to contend with, but thank God, she is alive! Hopefully, someday soon we shall be able to fulfill her dream of taking my Australian husband on a tour of our homeland. In the meantime, I rejoice in the blessings of technology allowing us to keep in visual contact, and to summon the prayerful support of so many members of the Body of Christ, who undoubtedly wove a wonderful net of healing and blessing over my mother. Praise the Lord!
I go to the Father: and whatsoever you shall ask the Father in My name, that will I do: that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
~ John 14:13
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