Please Help Decorate Mum's House After Her Major Stroke

Hello. My name is Jena and I'm making this fundraiser on behalf of my mum. In April of 2024, my 52 year old mum unfortunately suffered a major stroke and was hospitalised for 3 months. The stroke affected her right side, leaving her with a paralysed right arm, a weak right leg and she lost the ability to speak properly (aphasia)

During her stay in hospital, she caught COVID twice and subsequently developed pneumonia - this really didn't help her progress at all but thankfully, after 3 months of round the clock care, she was able to return home. She even spent her 53rd birthday in hospital and the nurses let her go outside so she could see her beloved dog Moose after months of being apart, that was really heart-warming!

On the 2nd July, 2024, she came home. ("Home" is a stretch, because although it's her house that she lives in, there's nothing homely about it.) I moved back in with my mum to care for her full time and she's been doing incredible. I'm so inspired by how determines she is to recover from this! It's been months of speech therapy, physio, district nurse visits, doctors appointments, hospital appointments etc and she's handled it all admirably well. Her speech is one of the main things that gets her down and she feels like she's lost herself completely - and I completely empathise with that. I can't imagine going from being able to speak without issue to then not being understood, not being able to communicate, it must be such a lonely feeling for her :(. All of this has taken a toll on her mental health; she's depressed and feels like she will never be who she was ever again. My heart absolutely breaks for her.

This is why I'm organising this fundraiser. At the level of disability she is at just now, she's unable to leave her home. These four walls are all she has, and I want to make this house a home for her. We're only a small family - just myself, my sister and brother in law. None of us earn a lot, I myself am currently out of work (due to caring for mum full time), so try as we might, we just can't seem to get the funds together to do some nice decorating for mum's house.

This house has no carpets, just bare floors that can be slippery and dangerous for mum to walk on. There's no wallpaper or paint, just the plaster covering up old holes. My mum sleeps in an old worse-for-wear single bed in the living room, and because her right arm doesn't operate it will fall out of the bed at night and leave her in pain the next day. Ideally, I would love to buy her a new double mattress (we've already acquired a double bed base!) so that she can have a nice bedroom to go to upstairs and feel more normal. I'd also like to fit carpets for her, paint the walls and just make it a nice place to be.

I've always heard that being in a nicer environment can boost your mental health, so I'd really love it if I could do this for her and make her just that little bit happier. She deserves it after all she's been through, and I feel awful that I can't simply afford to do this myself. Please if you can spare anything at all to help us, we would be more grateful than I could ever express with words. 2024 was a devastating year for my mum, I really want to make 2025 a kinder year to her.

Thank you so much for reading this far, and if you do decide to donate I genuinely can't thank you enough! Here's some beautiful pictures of my mum before her stroke, I'd do anything to help her feel happy again