Fargo, North Dakota (AP)

Jodi May had been enduring stress that few mothers could imagine, watching from her son’s bedside for signs that the 15-year-old was recovering from being shot in the face at Red Lake High School nearly ten weeks ago.

But on April 30, family members believe the stress became too much. She suffered a stroke and a heart attack and during mid-May remained in critical condition at a Fargo hospital.

“She had always been busy, but she was a healthy woman,” said Barbara Fox, Jodi May’s mother.

The morning of her stroke and heart attack, Jodi May had sent a bundle of fresh clothes with her best friend, Irene Green, to take to Jeff’s bedside. That was a sign of progress – it meant Jeff no longer needed the backless blue hospital gowns he had worn since entering the hospital after the March 21 shootings.

“I wasn’t gone for more than about 10 minutes,” Green said. “When I came back there was all this commotion in the room.”

Jodi May was on the bathroom floor of the hotel where she and her family were staying. She was rushed across the street to the emergency room at Fargo’s MeritCare Hospital.

She had complained to her mother of feeling dizzy the night before.

“There she was, right across from the hospital and we never even thought to have her checked out,” Fox said.

Doctors told Jodi May’s children that the prognosis wasn’t good. They said she could survive another 48 hours without surgery, which was not guaranteed to be a success.

Shane May, her eldest son, recalled that there was concern “she might end up like that Terri Schiavo lady,” referring to the brain-damaged Florida woman whose family fought bitterly over whether to allow her feeding tube to be removed before she died in March.

Shane May gathered his siblings, including 20-year-old Trisha, 16-year-old Tony and 9-year-old Ashley, and other family members. They decided there really wasn’t a decision to be made.

“We weren’t just going to let her pass like that,” said Shane, 21. “We had to give her a fighting chance.”

Jeff and his mother are in different hospitals, about three miles apart. Jeff, who suffered a stroke after he was wounded, squeezes visits to her between rehab for strengthening his limbs and speaking exercises.

Jeff was shot in the face when he tried to stop schoolmate Jeff Weise during the shooting spree, when Weise killed nine other people and himself. Red Lake High School principal Chris Dunshee also suffered a heart attack late last month. He was released from the hospital after doctors inserted a stent into one of his arteries.

During mid-May it had been a week since Jodi’s surgery, and her family has seen what they believe to be signs that she will recover. Doctors have removed the tube that was draining fluid from her head.

“She gives us the thumbs up or down when we ask her questions,” Trisha said, the same communication Jeff used during the earliest stages of his recovery.

“She opens her eyes,” Shane added. “She squeezes our hands when we ask her to.”

No one can say for sure whether she understands everything they say. But they believe.

“I don’t regret any decisions we made,” said her mother, Barbara Fox.

Shane May has taken over his mother’s role of keeping the family together. He is the spokesman and the decision-maker and the family’s main contact with the hospital. He’s on an extended leave of absence from his job as a pit boss at the Red Lake Band’s casino in Thief River Falls.

He has adopted the optimism that people around the hospital had seen in Jodi May.

And he says he’s thankful the stroke happened in Fargo. If it had happened at her house in Redby, on the Red Lake Reservation, she might have been treated in Bemidji, four hours from Jeff’s side. If it had happened on her drive from Redby to Fargo, she might have died.

Still, Jodi May’s stroke has robbed her of chances to witness milestones in her son’s recovery. Ten days before her stroke she watched Jeff stand for the first time, with the help of three therapists. She almost cried.

“It’s amazing,” she said then. “I can’t wait to see him take his first steps.” On May 5, he did.