Dear Karen,

Please stay strong! You are coping with an impossible situation, but I REALLY hope and pray it gets easier for you to deal with.

It must be hard enough being a mother to a teenager with heart problems without adding any other stuff.

RSD is not fair. It is not fair on the sufferer and it is not fair on the family. Unless people have it they don't REALISE how hard it is for people to live with this and for their whole community to live with it. Does your son get any form of support from organisations such as young carers (He might not be acting as a carer but he could then get some support from others in situations vaguelly similar). I know it's not a magic answer but it might mean that you had to worry less about the effect of this on him.

Unfortunatly, there are no mega answers, I wish I could wave a magic wand that would magically make you and everything else better, but I can't. All I can say is that though I cannot imagine living with your situation I can empathise to the best of my ability and I am here if you ever want to talk about this.

Things have a way of working out and I promise, that even through everything there will be people here to support you. The divorce must have made everything a lot harder, suddenly you lose the support of a spouse, even for simple tasks. Do you get any form of carer help?

Also, I don't know if you could use one but could you use a NG tube? just it's not "overly" invasive (no surgery just a numbed nostril!) - I do know how ugly they are, it's just then it might give you the option to recover abit more before the surgery.

Lots of love

Frogga xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (And Frogga's mum xxxxx)