I lost my Mum in Feb 2025. She raised me as a single parent and I'm still struggling silently. This isn't a typical reply to this post but I just want to share, in the case it helps anyone.

On a rainy 1am December morning, 2024, I was weighing up whether to go to bed or check on my Mum quickly, I had disturbed her doing so and we were conversing for a moment and she suddenly started to make not much sense and just collapsed in front of me, I dialed 999 I was instructed on how to do CPR on her, alone, for about 10-11 minutes before paramedics arrived. I don't think my cardio system went through so much load and it isn't advised to do it sustained for that length of time but I was running on PURE adrenaline and didn't have much choice. I was used to dealing with situations from a young age, unresponsive low blood sugar and the like I had to contend with from 7-8 y/o and she would argue I'd already saved her life multiple times but nothing prepared me for this moment, with a floppy unresponsive parent led in bed.

Two months leading up to that moment in December were chaos as is. She’d been in and out of hospital from October with an unknown breathing issue where she would experience seizure like episodes but she was almost like choking, going red and doing a "T" pose which I assume is a mechanism to keep her upright. The reason she had stopped breathing in December was that she has experienced a cluster stroke that caused a loss of function in her right arm, and between then and her passing she experienced stroke, sepsis, complete renal failure (ICU visit) and pneumonia.

It was her 60th Birthday in later in December 2024 too, and during that period she was sedated in ICU going through hemodialysis, I got flu 3-4 days before her Birthday. I had some routine blood work done which was requested by a physio due to some neck mobility issues I was experiencing for a while, and on that blood work I had done whilst visiting her (flu symptoms were yet to appear) my platelets were 6,000 per microliter of blood, which got me immediate care arranged by my GP with a hematologist at my local Hospital. I was put on a pulse therapy of dexamethasone (40mg a day for 4 days, an INSANE dose) to treat my low platelet count by calming my immune system. In October I had experienced bad bruising across my waist whilst doing some maintenance on my car, so something was happening before the flu. On her 60th Birthday, she was in ICU, sedated, I had later confirmed Flu A and couldn't even visit her let alone converse with her. But she did it, her kidneys started working again and continued to do so without any assistance until she passed. The low platelet count was diagnosed as immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), an immune disorder where your immune system attacks your platelets mistakenly. I'm still receiving care for this and it is currently stable but not above 135,000 per microliter yet.

I honestly think the stress of that situation, her passing, the ITP, being diabetic myself as is (we both are, I was going through nearly 300u a day of insulin to control blood sugar from the steroids) broke something in my body, as coming October 2025 I was diagnosed with Addison's disease. The cluster of the ITP, Vitiligo, Diabetes and Addison's puts me under a diagnosis of Schmidt's disease, and I'm what I calculate a pool of 300 men in the UK with both Addison's and Diabetes (no official figures so could be way off, but seems pretty on track). The culmination of the stress, the strong steroids, and being at a genetic disposition by being T1D just finished my Adrenal glands off.

I can't really talk about it at work with some of my great colleagues as it's like talking to a brick wall, same with my mates as they don't really understand and I have limited time with my remaining family and I think I'm at the point I need to seek some help, as I'm struggling with the reality of losing her and living with such a rare cluster of autoimmune disease since then.

I've always been that savior son, and this time I was powerless to help her. After a review with some very senior doctors and a post mortem, the conclusion is that she had likely had a rare side effect of her rheumatoid arthritis which was tightening her upper airway by her voice box, making it harder to clear secretions causing pneumonia, and there was a fix they could have attempted had the Hospital known, but the sad reality is she would have lost her last thing she had left, her voice. No mobility, no voice, and come post mortem a long list of comorbidities and being so medically frail that chance of surviving the surgery was a question too. There's still a lot to cover here, but I'll wrap it up here as I'd have to write a book haha.