The Caregiver And The Betrayal

My mother was sickly since I was in kindergarten, so my father spent my entire life taking care of my mother. She had many illnesses, including osteomyelitis, an infection that could have been controlled with antibiotics, but when she was a child it had yet to be invented.

So, the infection spread throughout her body and ate away at her hip bones. The total hip replacement wasn’t invented until I was in college. So my mother waddled through life, sometimes with a cane, other times in a wheelchair. The first hip replacement wasn’t that great and didn’t last long.

By then I was in college. Over time, my mother had eight hip replacements and all that surgery weakened the surrounding bones. In addition, she had other health problems along the way. I had friends and a social life, so I could block out her problems for most of my life, as did my older brother.

Tragedy hit when my father turned 76. I had never seen my father sick; the worst illness up to that point was a cold or the flu. Suddenly, he had many things all at once. He had prostate cancer, colon cancer, pneumonia and a debilitating stroke. He ended up in intensive care.

My brother had always been as far away from my parents as possible, as he was ashamed of them. He always had an overblown opinion of himself: arrogant, materialistic, money-hungry and selfish. That never improved with time. I didn’t have much of a friendship with him, as he was never interested. He thought of me as an impediment to his goals. His goal was money, and not much else.

We went our separate ways. After years of struggles, I had my own life, a husband, a home and my beloved dogs.