Well... Here goes a long story

My Mom is an incredible woman who has endured so much. Especially this last year. She's a fighter.

She's the matriarch of our family. She has 5 kids. I'm her youngest (33F) and she cares for me. I am physically disabled and have lived under her care my entire life. I cannot adequately describe how close of a relationship we have. She has fought to keep me alive for many years. She's my biggest advocate, my best friend, and the best mother.

She grew up fast in a very traumatic way. All of her family are gone except her baby sister (now 50). She herself is a recovered alcoholic (sober for 10 years). She didn't drink all the time, but once a year she would leave and be gone for 2 or 3 days. I always knew she would come back. She promised me that she would never leave me. She always came back. She drank to escape. Her and my Dad always had a rocky relationship. Just this summer, they separated for the final time, after nearly 40 years. She took it very hard. She hates him but still loves him. He's just done. He's my Dad, and I love him, but he is an asshole.

Mom is a workaholic. She has 3 jobs, plus cares for me. She's a boss. An HBIC if you will. She's smart and extremely caring but she can hurt you very easily. She always had a temper. She can be very intimidating. She can be venomous. She hates receiving help. She is a control freak. She gets shit done. She makes things happen.

Well, the day before my birthday on October 21st, she suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. She never presented typical symptoms of stroke. It seemed like she was about 6 beers in. We spent the weekend trying to figure out if she was taking something for pain (she had a cosmetic laser peel done that day) but when we got home on Sunday the 23rd, we called EMS. They took her to the hospital and she had a seizure. She had one on Saturday night too. They sent her to the next city for a CT scan and found a significant bleed on her right frontal lobe. They sent her to another nearby bigger city and they did an MRI (attached).

The white is swelling and the dark is blood. There was too much of it to see what happened.

Meanwhile my world was flipped. My oldest brother (44) came home on the 29th and brought me down to his place in the same city so I could be close to Mom as she recovers. He's also taking care of me.

Mom has made incredible progress. She doesn't remember much of the first two weeks, but she remembers segments of the weekend of her stroke.

Her executive reasoning and behaviour were impacted. Since then she has regained her cognitive function. She is essentially back. She's a bit more short of patience. She knows enough to be nice to people. She's seeing a psychologist for counselling and it is helping her process and control her emotions.

She's in inpatient rehabilitation. It's been a month. She may be discharged to outpatient rehab in the next few days. Physically she's fine, she even lost some weight. She's very strong as she can transfer me by herself (I am small, about 95lbs) from ideal heights such as from my wheelchair to my raised hospital bed. We are well versed in making sure there's no bending. We will be getting a patient transfer lift soon, we were working on that pre-stroke.

Her team want to wait until 6 months post-stroke to do another MRI to hopefully see what happened. The general assumption for now is that she had a very slow bleed for at least one month prior to the stroke.

Naturally we are terrified this will happen again. We may not be so lucky. What is your thoughts on this, given her incredible progress? Last we heard 3 weeks ago, the swelling had shrunk by 40%.

She still has a shorter attention span but it's getting better. She can hold her focus much longer. They have suspended her drivers license and she wants to work on getting it back when we go home (we live rural).

Now Mom's team say she may not be able to care for me anymore. But they don't know us. They don't see us work together. I don't know if they are worried about this happening again or if they are worried about her attention. I can help her. I always do. I always have.

They don't know how close we are or our co-dependence. Mom doesn't want me to leave, I don't want to leave. We need each other.

Right now we want to go home and settle back into our safe little bubble while she recovers. We plan to move here to the city soon after. Mom has it in her head that she's gonna go back to work soon. She has sick/holiday pay until the end of January and then over a year of disability with 70% wage. She doesn't need to rush back.

I guess I'm just looking for some kind of reassurance.