2025 is ending, my mom is in the ICU

An update from me

Last year at this time, I posted my 2024 annual wrap-up.

This year, I was planning to do this same.

Instead, I want to take a minute to acknowledge this newsletter’s first and greatest supporter, the person who has encouraged and praised my writing since I was 6 years old, and who has masked and protected me from COVID reinfections without protest: my mom.

Her birthday is Christmas Day, and this Christmas she turned 73.

While I was growing up, she always insisted that we carefully identify which presents were “Christmas” presents and which were “birthday” presents- ensuring that no one used the date as an excuse to skimp out.

Unfortunately, three days before Christmas (and her birthday), my mom had a bad fall on the stairs in our family home. She had previously been diagnosed with Parkinson’s dementia, which likely led to her fall.

Since then, she has been in the ICU. She has bleeding in the brain which has been ongoing for a week. We are unsure whether she will recover, but desperately hoping that she will.

I have been unable to travel to my mom’s bedside since I’m homebound and largely bedbound with Long COVID in DC, and my parents live in Pittsburgh. I cannot drive anymore, nor am I well enough to fly.

Although I am far away, via Facetime I can see up close that our medical system is overburdened. A massive flu wave is pouring into ERs and ICUs nationally. I’m frustrated that there is not enough care to go around; it’s even more frustrating knowing we don’t have to live this way, with such massive waves of preventable airborne disease.

I asked my brother to put a sign on her door requesting that doctors and nurses mask when they enter her room. From what I can tell via the background of video chats, they do seem to honor this request- sometimes. And sometimes not. When they do, the masks are, of course, surgicals. There is only so much I can do to protect my mom from a medical system that does not understand airborne infection control.

I wish my mom were here so I could complain to her about it. I wish I could get annoyed with her one more time for loving doctors and doctor propaganda a little bit too much, like her obsession with ER and now The Pitt. I wish she could read this article and text me something sweet and supportive after, like she always does.

I will return with a real wrap-up sometime in the New Year, when I’m in less of a crisis situation. In the meantime, I so appreciate your continued support, and I do hope your holiday season has been better than mine.

Hoping for a better and healthier 2026 for us all,

Julia