My Mother's Strength

My mother caught tuberculosis, and watching her beat it taught me what it means to hold on. This is her story.

When I was a child she had a delicate operation on her uterus, and afterward that area of her body became infected with TB bacteria. Tuberculosis is a contagious disease that usually settles in the lungs, though it can reach other organs too. People with it tend to develop a long cough, run fevers, shake with chills, feel worn out, and lose weight. The standard approach is a course of several antibiotics taken over many months, and things can go wrong along the way: the bacteria can grow resistant to the drugs, or the infection can come back. When TB settles somewhere other than the lungs, as it did in her case, doctors sometimes call it anti-pulmonary. Treating it is hard, and harder still when the strain stops responding to the usual medicines, so patients often cycle through different antibiotics for long stretches.

The infection turned vicious. Her whole body swelled and ached, and the surgical wound went septic. The damage to her uterus left her unable to have another child, which is how I came to be an only child. Figuring out exactly what was wrong took a long time, and she spent years in the hospital. The pills she had to swallow weren't coated, so they were brutally bitter. They would leave her lips raw and inflamed. My father took to cooking porridge at home and folding her medicine into it to blunt the sharp taste.

I was very small then. Every so often she would come home for a few days before being sent back for more treatment. The first time I saw her I didn't know who she was and ran off to watch her from a distance. She looked so sad that I crept a little closer, and something in me recognized her as my mother, even though she had been away so long that I barely knew her face. Once I understood, I climbed onto her lap and refused to let anyone pull me away for the rest of her visit. I was a toddler, yet I can still see those days clearly.

One of the male nurses who looked after her kept pressing her to finish the full course of medicine, right down to the final dose. He wouldn't let up with the encouragement. She decided she wanted to be well so she could come back to her family, so she stuck to the plan, and they finally let her go home once the swelling had gone. Other patients on the ward who stopped their treatment partway through died of the infection.

Being discharged wasn't the end of it. She went in daily to have the wound re-dressed, and still it wouldn't close. Doctors tried drug after drug while it stayed septic, and in time the infection turned antibiotic-resistant and began to spread. I grew up with the sight of her in pain, and I prayed for her constantly. Surgeons operated more than once to cut away dead and infected tissue, then stitched her back together, over and over. The suffering was hard to describe. Somehow she found the strength to keep going until the wound at last healed.

After her uterus finally mended, years on, her chest started giving her trouble. She was told she had asthma and was treated for it, wrongly, for a long time. The asthma drugs only made her worse. She went for a second opinion, and that doctor found she was actually allergic to dust and a few other things, which turned out to be treatable.

She lived with near-constant pain through most of my childhood, and she is now a sturdy, respected woman of 79. She owns a dairy farm and works hard keeping the land in order, and she also manages a handful of rental units that are part of her investments. For years she has been the family's anchor: tough, steady, hardworking, and stubborn in the best sense. What she taught me is that patience and plain hard effort can carry you through even the most crushing, drawn-out ordeals. Maybe her story will give some strength to someone else facing something like it.

-Anonymous Contributor