Pam Fleming shouldn't be sitting on the Internet at night, in her house in Kinvara, Co Galway, looking up euthanasia websites. She shouldn't have to be considering ending her suffering, and her son's, by putting them both to sleep.
Yet she knows, that the way things stand, her 25-year-old brain-injured, wheel-chair bound son, Sammy, will not get the services he needs unless she collapses. The health board have told her as much. If that happens, Sammy will end up in a psychiatric hospital or old people's
Pam felt "gutted" after the last "case conference", where she was told it would be at least another two years before her son could get something as simple as an electric wheelchair.
Sammy has the strength to wheel himself down the hill to the shops to buy a packet of biscuits, but Pam hasn't the strength to push him back home up the hill. And this news that even an electric wheelchair is too much to ask for comes after five years of getting services such as occupational therapy in bits and pieces, while no one ever offers a long-term vision of how Sammy can live a fulfilling existence.
Sammy tries hard. After cracking his skull in a fall off a push-bike at the age of 20, he went into a coma and was maintained by life support. As he gradually regained consciousness, nobody - not even his mother - could tell what was going on in that damaged brain of his. Yet Sammy persevered and became well enough to be released from hospital. A doctor, who Pam bumped into in the corridor, told her that she would have to find a place to put Sammy, although - the doctor warned - that would be difficult as such places were hard to find. Sammy, Pam thought angrily, was not a package to be put away. So she took him home.
The first year, she told herself that she wouldn't have to make it to a second year. Five years on, she's still counting time. The only progress Sammy has made has been as a result of the work of friends in Kinvara, who come to the house daily to help Sammy with exercises Pam learned from a private clinic in the UK.
"Every night we sit here, the two of us, watching TV. Sammy has tried really hard. He wants to be in the thick of it, not watching TV with his mother," says Pam.
Pam and Sammy - who has two younger brothers in their early 20s - have learned the hard way that people with brain injury have only their families to fall back on.
But if they are to survive happily, they need Sammy to be given specialist, residential care in a place which will nurture him and encourage his strengths. Now aged 50 with a marriage separation behind her, Pam is hopeful, but she isn't holding her breath.