Mission:not Aborted👶
“You’re probably wondering how we got here. Me too.
On Wednesday, May 11, 2022, I found myself hunkered down in a recliner in an ICU room. We’d been in the hospital for 55 days, waiting for a miracle. I was witnessing the bravest, most courageous fighter I’d ever known — my mom, Shirley Faye Stringfellow. She was my hero.
Well, that didn’t age well. Shortly after writing those words, things rapidly deteriorated. Mom’s health took a swift nosedive that I can only attribute to the misdiagnosis of her multiple conditions. The ICU doctors delivered an ultimatum: it was either trach time or goodbye. In a moment of profound weakness, they effectively forced my father’s hand.
Mom is dead. The funeral was yesterday. What do I do with my life now? I knew, with a gut-wrenching certainty, that they were going to kill her at hospice. And they did it. We didn’t get to say goodbye.
To understand the depths of this loss — and the journey that led me here — I need to go back to my own beginning.
My life began with its own set of challenges, a testament to God’s plan and purpose for everyone. From the moment I was conceived, my mother believed I was a miracle. She often spoke of a vision Oral Roberts had, seeing me in her belly. And so, my story truly begins with my birth — born with a rare and serious condition called Chiari Malformation Type II.
It’s a mouthful, isn’t it? My mom used to joke that it sounded like something out of a medical drama on TV. But for us, it was real life — terrifying, miraculous, relentless life.
I was born weighing just four pounds and six ounces, tiny but stubbornly alive. Before I even knew this world, I was already fighting for my place in it — and so was my mom, right beside me. Doctors discovered the Chiari and hydrocephalus before I ever opened my eyes. They placed a VP shunt when I was just five days old — a slim, coiled lifeline that would drain excess fluid from my brain and keep me here long enough to grow into the daughter my mom had prayed for.
And oh, did she pray. My earliest memories are not of hospitals or surgeries — though there were plenty of those — but of my mother’s voice, praying over me in the middle of the night when the headaches were bad. Whispering to God when the shunt failed — again. Holding my hand when I woke up in recovery, tubes and monitors tangled around my tiny body.
They told her I wouldn’t live. That I wouldn’t walk. That I wouldn’t learn like other kids. And every single time, she shook her head and said, “You don’t know my God.”
I did walk. I did learn — sometimes differently, sometimes more slowly, sometimes in ways that made no sense to anyone but her and me. And when my brain didn’t work like other people’s brains, she was the one who reminded me that God doesn’t make mistakes. She made my difference feel like a design, not a defect.
Over the years, my life filled up with scans, surgeries, migraines, pressure headaches that made my skull feel like it might split in two. The shunt malfunctioned eight times — eight times! — but every time, my mom was there. She was always there.
So when they told me, “Prepare yourself, she’s not coming home this time,” I didn’t believe them. How could I? This was my mother — the one who never left my side, the one who believed in miracles when the world called them impossible.
But the miracle didn’t come the way I prayed for it. Not this time. The hospice bed became her last battleground. And they made us choose — or so they said. “Trach time or goodbye.” As if a single choice could undo decades of fighting. As if a machine could replace the breath of life that God gave her.
She was gone before we could even say goodbye properly. A whole lifetime of words I never got to speak — gone. The world went quiet in a way I can’t explain. My hero, my anchor, my mother — gone.
And yet here I am, still breathing. Still waking up every day under the weight of all she carried for me. And maybe that’s the point — the reason I’m telling you this. I’m not writing this to relive the pain. I’m writing this because if my life has taught me anything, it’s this: broken things can still shine. Weak things can still stand. Lost things can still be found.
Mom taught me that faith isn’t about the miracle you get — it’s about the miracle you become. She became mine. Maybe now it’s my turn to become someone else’s.
So this is my story — hydrocephalus, Chiari, the shunt ticking away in my head like a tiny timekeeper, reminding me that life is fragile. But also reminding me that every breath is borrowed grace. And I carry her with me — Shirley Faye Stringfellow, the bravest woman I ever knew — every time I keep going when the world says stop.
Maybe that’s how we heal. Maybe that’s how we live again — by living on, by loving on, by telling our story and letting it stand as proof that hope never dies, not really. It just changes shape and finds new lungs to breathe through.
So if you’re reading this, and you’re carrying something too heavy for your hands — I want you to know I see you. My mother would have seen you too. She would have told you that your story isn’t finished yet. And neither is mine.”
