What a Week!/ A Mother's Greatest Fear

Friends who follow me on facebook will already know, but this was a horribly stressful week for our family!

On Tuesday afternoon an incredibly anxious message popped into my husband's family's WhatsApp group on my phone. It was from my sister-in-law who lives in Egypt and she exclaimed:

"Does anyone know what happened to Thata?! Deni posted something on facebook!" [Thata is my husband cousin's Deni's wife]

I went to facebook and saw that cousin Deni had posted an urgent, if vague, request for prayers for his wife, who was hospitalized in the ICU (Deni is a church pastor). You can see multiple photos of his wife Thaise in her website here. She's a freelance photographer, 30 years old and mother of two young children, a girl who is three and a boy who is nine months old!

The replies from my in-laws came quickly and were devastatingly scary. "She's in the ICU, they replied, she had a horrible headache and they did an MRI and she has a tumor in her brain!" We were not supposed to share the details with other people, but I immediately posted a request for prayers/thoughts in my facebook feed.

The next day (Wednesday) Deni shared on fb that she was undergoing a surgical procedure and I also shared with my friends, while receiving more detailed updates from my in-laws on my phone. The doctors decided to do a procedure to drain fluid from her brain to alleviate the pressure of the foreign growth. It was successful and we breathed more easily.

Word came from my in-laws about the fact that the growth didn't seem to be malignant, and that it wasn't in the brain, but in the cerebellum, which was good news (not too much would be affected afterwards in case of surgery). Of course we knew that it could still be bad news (i.e. cancer) and that she would have to have surgery.

On Thursday morning Deni wrote a long post on facebook revealing more details -- the his wife was going to undergo a very dangerous brain surgery that afternoon for a tumor in the cerebellum. He expressed incredible confidence and said he had surrendered the life of his wife to God and wanted that His will be done. It was a truly moving post that made me cry.

Mid-afternoon he posted an update saying that she had just gone into surgery and included a heartbreaking photo of his baby son sleeping. I know that I and thousands of other people in Brazil and around the world couldn't think of anything else for the next several hours, except of Thata's surgery and we were all praying that it would all go well. In the meantime, my in-laws shared privately that before the surgery the surgeons had concluded it didn't seem to be a tumor, but a blood clot, good news again!

Sometime after 10 pm Deni posted on facebook that the surgery had been a total success and that Thata had already woken up and he had talked to her! He also revealed that apparently the doctors had removed a blod clot and not a tumor.

On Friday & yesterday she was already eating and walking and it seems that she is going to be released from the ICU today. We are still waiting for the biopsy results, but hoping it will be good news again!
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Years ago I wrote for the first time about my greatest fear as a mother: dying and leaving my sons motherless. I wrote about it again almost precisely (by a day!!) a year later, and think that this fear is slowly getting weaker as my sons grow. This week I feared for Thaise's children, though, as did every family member and friend who knows them! I hope that this was just a horrible scare and that these beautiful children will have their mother for years and years to come.