A Daughter's Story about her Mother
Happy Mother's Day! 👑
Happy Mother’s Day 💐
Happy Mother’s Day! Although the dates are different around the world, the message remains the same. Mothers help build the backbone of our society.
A mother’s struggle with the medical system 🏥
For this week’s post, and in celebration of Mother’s Day, one of our community members wanted to share her mother’s story of dealing with inadequacies within the healthcare system for women.
By: Brenna
I interviewed my mother, Liz and It has been a long time coming. My mom’s journey of life has been full of the unexpected, from the early deaths of her father and fiancee to unexplained reproductive health problems starting in her mid-30s. When I first started the interview she said, “Yeah. I don't know how much I have to contribute.” and I responded “Your story, I will show you”. The titles of each section are lyrics from some of my mom’s favorite songs.
**Discretion Advised— parts of this story contain traumatic experiences that may be triggering**
“She’s got a smile it seems to me…”
“My name’s Liz, um age 49… what else?”
Liz's life has been a journey marked by resilience, determination, and a relentless pursuit of well-being against the odds. Her childhood, filled with travel and adventure, laid the foundation for her strong sense of family unity. Even when faced with challenges and opposition as a young mother, Liz defied advice to abort her child, choosing instead to navigate the complexities of single motherhood with unwavering determination.
“Yeah, it was hard. It was freaking hard. It was hard even having my kids because everyone was against me. When I was first pregnant, I mean everyone including the baby's father. They wanted me to abort the baby.”
Struggling against the tides of financial hardship, Liz relied on welfare temporarily to complete her college education, vowing to never return. She eventually graduated on the Dean's List from UNCW and hasn’t been on welfare again. This was a quote from our conversation;
“So I think I only missed… I think I might have missed a week of classes… It was Spring break and I gave birth to you (Brenna) like two weeks later.”
She faced the uphill battle of being a single mother living in a trailer with three young kids, yet her determination propelled her through college and into the workforce, where she worked 40-60 hours a week, traveled, and didn’t have any extra support from her job to help care for her children. When asked how she wished her company would have supported her more as a mother she said;
“I guess I kind of didn't expect. I never had this entitled mentality where other people were responsible for me, so I never felt it was the responsibility of the company. I mean it would have been great if they had some kind of connection with a Child Care Network that you get a discount with or something.”
Despite the lack of support in her professional life, Lizneth's personal life saw smooth pregnancies and natural births. She opted for a traditional approach, trusting in the strength that women have displayed throughout history. In the workforce, she had to forge her own path, seeking support from friends for childcare during work trips. Childcare is still something women fight for daily in the workforce, I can’t imagine how much more difficult it was 20 years ago.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…”
The turning point in Lizneth's life came in her early 30s when her health took a hit. After noticing a change, she was first referred to a cardiologist who diagnosed her with a heart condition;
“‘I'm not gonna put you on heart meds just yet, but something's up here, we need to keep an eye on your heart.’ I had elevated cholesterol at this point and they were concerned about how elevated my cholesterol was and thought that it was probably genetic. And so he wanted to keep an eye on me. I never went back to him”
A couple of years after this, she experienced her first miscarriage. After having three healthy and smooth pregnancies, she had three miscarriages within a year. At this point in the story she wants to let us know that a couple of years prior, she got breast implants and was on birth control for one year of those two years. The second of her miscarriages was one of the most traumatic experiences of her life. During the conversation we took a break because the weight of the experience still brings her to tears.
She was in the second trimester when her second miscarriage happened. She was all alone at her home when the baby came out of her. Liz and the father put the baby in a container and took her to the doctor.
“I thought they were going to test and see why I would have lost. You know why I had this miscarriage to see if there was anything wrong with the baby, but they ended up throwing it away as waste… Which broke my heart because I could have kept my baby and buried her.”
I reassured her during this part of the conversation because for so long she had just accepted that that’s just the way the healthcare system is, feeling that there was no way to change it. She felt like her doctors didn’t respect her desires or emotional fragility during this very traumatic time of her life.
“It wasn't like some clump of anything, I could even see the sex of the baby, it was a girl”
“I just felt like I was just being pushed through the system.”
This story alone showed me how little the healthcare system understands, or cares for, the health of a woman. If they did, then they would have understood how traumatizing it is for an expecting mother to lose a child so late into pregnancy. It makes me wonder how many more women have experienced this same thing. It’s truly sad to imagine.
“And I'm not the only one, there's women that have to deal with this all the time and do it alone. I guess I never saw it as a responsibility of the Healthcare System. I just always saw it as that's my problem because, oh I screwed up and, I wasn't responsible enough to make sure I was married first and blah blah, you know. I mean it made me who I am. but I mean gosh, yeah how different it would be if there was emotional support and having a system in place where all those things were taken care of and we could go out and do our day-to-day, just live life in a much healthier way, and be healthier people. Not having to carry these traumas and these heartbreaks all alone.”
Despite experiencing two miscarriages and grappling with the emotional toll of that loss alone, she remained steadfast. Her health issues led her on a journey of self-discovery, questioning the impact of implants and birth control on her well-being. In the face of dismissive doctors, Lizneth undertook her own research.
“He kind of looked at me and tried to make me feel stupid. Because I wasn't just blindly following his recommendations. I had another doctor tell me to Google something because I was asking about something. He said just go and Google it. I started realizing these doctors don't care about me. They really don't care about trying to figure out what the hell's going on with me. And so I stopped blindly believing everything they said”
My sister Brielle was born to Liz after her third miscarriage, but this delivery brought her health conditions to an all-time low. It was only the start of a long and arduous quest to determine the cause of her health problems and take control of her own well-being.
“You know when you start doing this research, it's like you're literally going down a rabbit hole. There's so much out there that isn't even touched on.”
Following my sister's birth, Liz’s symptoms became chronic, experiencing extreme fatigue and pain, all the while meeting with one dismissive doctor after another. Her cycle had gotten so bad that she would wake up in the middle of the night with the entire bed covered in blood. She would be walking to the bathroom with blood streaming down her leg. The only option the doctors offered her was a hysterectomy after they discovered fibroids covering her uterus from top to bottom.
“Your uterus is the size of a two or three-month pregnancy.” The doctor says “You have too many. It's too severe - the only thing we can do is a hysterectomy.” That was it. There was no “let's test your hormone levels” or “let's see why you've got a uterus full of fibroids”. There was literally no other talk. No, nothing, just cut out my female organ.”
At this time, Liz had already been reading some things and suggested to the doctor that she could have estrogen dominance and was once again followed up with a stare like she was dumb and a response that was condescending, “Everyone has estrogen” the doctor said. This was one of the last times she went to a traditional doctor. The fact that women don't feel respected, safe, or heard by their own doctors is incredibly upsetting.
A layer to the genetic history is added by Liz's mother (my grandmother May), who underwent her own health journey with the help of a holistic healer in Panama. May had a large fibroid in her uterus, so big she couldn’t even walk. The doctors said she wouldn’t be able to have children. May, who was raised in an environment where alternative medicine was common, decided to travel to Panama to meet a "Curandero," or "Medicine Man," there.
The man saw her and immediately knew there was a mass growing in her body. He gave her instructions to abstain from sexual activity for six months and to take a liquid medicine he concocted from plants. Within the following weeks, there were chunks of biological material coming out of her vagina. In addition, the Curandero declared that she would bear children, a girl being the first. Liz was May's first-born kid out of her eventual four children.
It seems the only options presented for women involve cutting something out of their bodies - but never attempting to discover a deeper issue. Some women have no other option but to heed the advice. Others choose to take the hard road and discover alternative solutions. Why are women doing all the work when it comes to our health? Why is women’s health still one of the most underfunded areas of medical research?
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”
Liz’s story becomes a testament to the significance of education and informed decision-making in healthcare, stressing the need for individuals to understand the risks and benefits associated with their choices.
After years of research, self-doubt, pain, and loneliness, Liz discovers something! As I mentioned early in the story, Liz got breast implants a couple of years before these issues began to surface. As she was determined to find the root cause, she began to research the type of breast implants she got.
“I think he told me they can hold 3,000 plus pounds of pressure like these were the Cadillac implants or something, you know, they're textured silicone and that's it turns out to be the worst ones”
At the time she got them, these implants were FDA-approved, the doctor never told her she had to take them out and was never informed of their possible side effects. 12+ years later she’s researching the symptoms of silicone poisoning and she’s experiencing every single symptom. She immediately begins to research affordable options to get them removed. Her insurance, of course, doesn’t cover an operation like this, so it’s a difficult task. She eventually finds someone.
“So I had to go through a very very difficult 4-hour surgery to remove them. My breasts were kind of mutilated”
“I mean it was a hard lesson to learn. Wow, really freaking do your research really you got to advocate for yourself because that's one of the hard lessons I learned too is that they don't care about me. We have to advocate for ourselves.”
Liz also was able to find a FaceBook group of over 100,000 women who were experiencing the same thing. The group has since grown substantially. This support helped her to feel like she wasn’t alone. She was also able to share some of her post-op images with doctors who are in this area of research, and who are advocating for women.
After the operation, some things slowly improved. But due to the severe damage to the implants, her inflamed reproductive issues, and the high likelihood that the silicon had already been leaking in her body, there was still much to heal from. This was another beginning.
“I don’t believe implants caused everything. But I do believe that they definitely at the very least triggered a lot of the problems.”
Through Liz's narrative, the call for affordable and accessible healthcare solutions, support for mothers, and a more compassionate healthcare system becomes not just a personal plea but a universal demand for change. Liz's story becomes a catalyst for advocating for a system that recognizes the strength and resilience of women, offering them the support and care they deserve.
When asked what the main areas of women’s health that needed more attention she said:
Mental health: Doctors supporting women during traumatic health experiences.
Reproductive Health: Being able to give women more options when problems arise.
Accessibility: Insured, regular ultrasounds to watch for ovarian cancer and other issues.
Education: Keeping women informed of their decisions from the start.
She says that it took her ten years of digging, adjusting, and trying all kinds of natural and synthetic remedies to get to the point now where her periods are regular again. She’s regaining her energy, sleeping better, and starting to see life beyond her physical ailments. She says not every woman has the option, or even the awareness to step out and do it like she has, and they shouldn’t have to.
I think the most important lesson that Liz wants us all to walk away with is that you can’t solve any problem if you’re only treating the surface.
“Always cry for love, never cry for pain”
In closing, I asked Liz what she would tell women who are going through the fear and loneliness of not being supported by their healthcare system..
“You have to advocate for yourself. You really have to take it seriously and fight for yourself. You've got to be willing to stand up and go to see doctors because there are always going to be situations where we need to see a doctor. They're not the end all be all though. Don't completely blindly trust them because they don't know everything.”
“Okay, let's see, what are these symptoms? And how do we treat your symptoms” instead of “let's go find the cause”. That seems to be the general way it is. I would say, be prepared to do your own individual research read up on it and find out the pros and cons if they won't give it to you, make them tell you”
I am very thankful for this opportunity to tell my mother's story. I have seen her struggle time and time again over many years, with almost no one believing in her. I always tried my best to support her because I saw that she was doing it alone. The fact that I am able to be the catalyst to telling her story is of my greatest honors and joys. Not only do I hope there is relief in her telling of the story, but I also hope that another woman can read this and find motivation to continue fighting for herself, because, she is worth it.