MDS

When I was ten years old the doctors diagnosed my mom with "Myelodysplastic Syndrom," MDS for short.  Huh?  Basically her bone marrow does not produce red blood cells, which makes it hard to...be alive.  The treatment for MDS is blood transfusions.  That's great, right?  Yes, except that the blood transfusions have side effects.  The doctors also told her that the problem with the transfusions is that over time, about ten years, the iron in all the blood will build up in her liver, and without any way to remove it, her liver would fail.  As a ten year old little girl I thought about the things that I might have to experience without my mother; high school, dating, graduation, getting married, having children of my own.  Basically everything.  It was very hard for that little girl.  I remember the first time she went to the hospital for a transfusion.  It was a school day, I am sure I learned nothing that day.  When school got out, I remember just standing in front of the building by the flag pole, facing west, I could see my house, and wondering what life would bring.  
The transfusion helped emensly, she got them about every two to three months.  She was able to live a more normal life.  That "ten year" death sentance (that is what I felt it was) was always at the back of my mind, and I cherished my time with her.  
Skip forward a few years, the transfusions were getting closer together, every 6 weeks or so.  I was in high school, which was right across the street from the hospital were she would get blood.  I would go visit her during my lunch break or after school.  I would always take the stairs, even though she was on the 7th floor, it was good training for basketball.    
Then a miracle occured.  When I was twenty, some lovely person, developed a medicine that flushes iron out of livers!  Oh happy day!  Mom started using it and it worked!  Mom was at my high school graduation, she helped me move to college, she traveled around watching me play basketball, she was there when I graduated from college, she was there when I got married, she was there when my four babies were born.  And twenty-seven years after recieving that "ten year" death sentence, she is still here, being the best grandma the world has ever known.
But, she is getting old.  Seventy.  She has lived longer than anyone, ANYONE, thought she would.  She gets blood once a week.  When she is not getting blood she is home in bed.  She is so tired.  Of everything.  It is so hard to see her like this.  Her body is old and seems to be shutting down.  She wears oxygen all the time, cause it is hard to breath when you don't have any blood in your body.   Her heart, her poor heart, one day it has no blood to pump and the next it is working overtime to pump the new blood.  No wonder she has congestive heart failure.  She is in pain most of the time, from...evrything.  She often asks me why she is still here.  She misses dad and wants to be with him.  After grandma died, she held my hand and whispered, "I hope I'm next."  Everytime I get a phone call late at night or early in the morning my heart stops becuase I am sure it is the call.  It is funny, funny is not the right word, but I don't know what is, that I find myself lying in bed at night after everyone is alseep and writing my talk for her funeral in my head, or sitting in ward choir and thinking how the song we are practicing would be great at her funeral.  I guess it is my way of coping with the inevitalbe.  The hard thing is, I don't want her to have to live like this.  It is awful.  But I don't want her to go either.    

Hymn #292 "Oh My Father"
verse 4
When I leave this frail existence,
When I lay this mortal by,
Father, Mother, may I meet you
In your royal courts on high?
Then, at length, when I've completed
All you sent me forth to do,
With your mutual approbation
Let me come and dwell with you.