Mom's
recovery an early present
Mike
Hautamaki
Mesabi Daily News
Last Updated: Saturday, December 25th, 2004
10:28:52 PM
VIRGINIA — Christmas arrived a week early
for me and my family this year.
Come to think of it, the gifts started
flowing in around six months ago.
Last Friday, a letter came in the
mail from my mother Pam's neurologist. It
was a short note, only four lines long, but
one sentence made my mom grin from ear to
ear:
"Per my last evaluation of Pamela Hautamaki
in August, 2004, I believe she is capable of
driving a motor vehicle safely,” the note
read.
The letter was just the latest in a string
of improvements my mom has seen in her
health, which has given us all a boost over
these past few months. It's the best holiday
season we've had in three years, simply
because we've all been able to enjoy it.
Last November, I wrote a piece for one of
our Health Pulse editions about my mom's
struggle with CIDP (chronic inflammatory
demyelinating polyneuropathy), a
debilitating nerve disease that left her
physically and emotionally wrecked. CIDP
took nearly everything from her. It left her
confined to a wheelchair, took away her
driver's license and her job, made her a
prisoner in her own home, and in some ways
also kept her from being a wife and a mom.
I wrote that story approximately 18 months
after my mom was stricken with the disease
in March of 2002. She had made some small
improvements, but still had a long road
ahead of her. CIDP is a strange illness. It
turns your body's own immune system against
you and unleashes its rage on your nervous
system. It strikes some more quickly than
others, and unfortunately that was the case
with my mom.
What started out as tingling and numbness in
her legs quickly became something much more
serious. A perfectly healthy woman to that
point, my mom suddenly found herself numb
from the neck down, unable to use her arms
and legs and greatly weakened by the onset
of the disease.
The next year and a half was an enormous
test for my family. My mom spent nearly four
months in three different hospitals,
enduring a litany of tests and treatment
plans that failed to put her on the path to
recovery. My dad put most everything else in
his life on the back burner so he could be
by my mom's side every available moment,
while my brother and sister and I tried to
do whatever we could to ease the pain they
were going through.
It was the toughest experience I've ever
dealt with. Many unpleasant memories are
still etched in my mind, one of which has
hit me like a freight train more than once
over the past few weeks.
It's two days after Christmas, two years
ago, and my mom is sitting in front of her
computer. I walk into the room and see the
tears streaming down her face. She's reading
about her illness and sees that a small
percentage of CIDP victims, those that have
the progressive form of the disease, are
never able to free themselves from its
grasp.
"That's me," she says. "That's me. This is
how I'm going to die."
All I could do was hold onto her and cry
with her while all sorts of sad thoughts
crept into my head.
She's not going to be there to see me
graduate from college, I thought.
Fast forward six months to my commencement
ceremonies at the DECC in Duluth. While
waiting for it all to begin, I heard a
familiar voice up in the crowd. I glanced up
to my right and saw my entire family looking
down upon me. My mom made the trip down that
day, even though she hadn't been feeling
well, and there she was, waving and flashing
a huge smile.
My mind briefly flashed back to that
harrowing moment we shared months before and
tears started to well up in my eyes. It was
one of the happiest days of my life, because
she was there to see it.
Running out of options, my parents had
connected with a neurologist at the
University of Minnesota earlier that year
that wanted to try a different approach to
treating my mom's illness — chemotherapy.
Finally, we had found something that worked.
Nine long months later, he delivered the
good news. The chemo had arrested her
disease.
It wasn't until this spring that my mom
began to see marked improvement, especially
in her strength. In March, my parents and I
moved out of our three-story house in
Virginia and into a smaller, one-level home
in Midway. The change has been wonderful for
my mom. It's given her so much more freedom
and independence.
After building up enough strength, she began
walking this past summer with leg braces and
a walker. She soon graduated to a pair of
paisley-colored canes she picked out herself
and has been up and about ever since. She
still uses her motorized wheelchair and
battles pain and fatigue on a daily basis,
but walking is something my mom at one point
felt she would never do again. It definitely
has been a welcome sight.
The biggest improvement she has experienced,
though, has been in her hands. While still
far from normal, my mom is now able to do
many of the things she used to, such as
laundry, writing out bills, washing dishes
and even a little cooking. She helped out a
great deal with Thanksgiving dinner,
preparing the meal, setting the table and
cleaning up.
Thanksgiving was all about making new
memories in new surroundings and Christmas
has been much the same for us thus far. My
mom and dad went shopping to buy their
gifts, rather than paging through catalogs
and ordering them like she did last year.
They decorated the house together, wrapped
gifts together, and put together the menu
for our annual Christmas Eve dinner. She
even wrote out all of her Christmas cards
and baked a big batch of cookies.
(Hey, who knows? Maybe next year I'll ask
her to drive me around town to do my
Christmas shopping.)
With all the preparation finally behind us,
we’ll all gather together Christmas Eve and
just enjoy being a family. We’ll watch the
Vikings-Packers game, stuff our faces with
food, and make a mess of our living room
floor as we tear open our gifts. This
Christmas will be different, but it’ll also
be just like so many of the ones I loved
while growing up. It’s great to have that
feeling back again.
As the New Year approaches, my mother's
health will hopefully continue to improve.
These days she spends much of her free time
helping others around the world with CIDP
cope with the disease, keeping in touch with
them via either email or phone. She does her
best to lift their spirits, always trying to
deliver the same message: "Never give up
hope. It may be all that you have left."
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