“Move faster, you potato sack!” she growled, her brows furrowed in a single line, disgust frozen on her face.
This is how my mother followed me to the hospital. I had been diagnosed with lung tuberculosis a month earlier, and this was the day my inpatient treatment was set to begin.
.
I could barely move my legs. Intoxicated by weakness.
If only I had the energy to talk Grandma out of this. She insisted that my mother needed to follow me. In her mind, it would strengthen our relationship. So, my mother followed me from the railway station to the hospital entrance—800 meters of hell.
So stupid. So infuriating. And so helpless. I could barely walk, let alone argue with Grandma or make the journey to the hospital on my own terms. I could’ve just called a taxi, even carried my suitcase. Just leave me alone, as you always have. Please don’t make this worse than it already is.
It would have been so much better. But here we are — my mother furious that she’s wasting time with me. She was deeply irritated that I was walking too slowly and that she’d waste even more time. She had planned to organize another martial arts event in the park near our home that morning. Much more important than taking care of her very sick daughter.
She lacked the guts to say “no” to Grandma — to openly admit that she didn’t care what happened to me. The truth was, she didn’t. But my family was always good at putting on a show when it was needed. Why show how you really feel?
My mother stopped trusting regular doctors a long time ago. This was my third lung issue.
During the second one, about a liter of fluid was found between my lung tissues, and I was immediately hospitalized. She came to the hospital soon after.
.
But she didn’t go to the floor where my ward was. She told me to meet her downstairs in the entrance hall. There, I was forced to listen to a 25-minute lecture on how doctors would kill me with antibiotics and how I needed to leave the hospital with her. She promised she would treat me with wet salted sheets, and that all the liquid in my lungs would disappear.
I went back to my ward, exhausted, and fell asleep immediately. Mother never came back. Not for that lung issue, nor for any of the others. I was a lost cause—a heretic, a mad girl who didn’t listen to her own mother.
Now, she was furious that she had followed her daughter to a place where the doctors would certainly kill her with chemo.
Whatever my mother said or did, Grandma always justified it.
Grandma, an educated doctor herself, a renowned neurologist and scientist, even defended the salted wet sheets:
“Oh, you know, pumpkin, it actually makes sense. Before antibiotics were invented, this is how people treated the lung condition you had.”
No matter how sick or traumatizing my mother’s actions were, they were always excused. Whether it was beating me, my sister, or Grandma; suggesting alternative treatments that could have killed me; or any number of other things.
Now, when thousands of kilometers separate me from my family, I begin to think that my mother was mentally deranged. I’ve read books with similar stories of abuse, and the authors don’t hesitate to point out that their relatives were mentally ill.
Thanks to everything I’ve been through, I can now say it openly:
My mother was very sick. Mentally ill.
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