Searching for Answers

 

Once Mom’s motley combination of khaki-colored duffle bags and hard-backed Samsonite luggage landed in our second floor guest room, it felt like we had upended her life completely.  Coming to live with us meant her accepting a lot of “No!”: No living in her own house. No enjoying a relaxed retirement. No tending to flowers in her beautiful garden.  And no regular visits with relatives and friends. Instead, in just the first month of her arrival, a nonstop schedule of appointments had dominated most of Mom’s mornings and afternoons.  And those appointments meant she had to endure a barrage of doctor-authorized poking and proddings:

X-rays, CT scans, surgeon appointment, mammogram, lab tests, internist visit, physical exam; pre-surgery fast; surgery; cancelled surgery; Vitamin K injection; second round of pre-surgery testing, pre-surgery fast, regular phone consults with doctors and finally surgery.

A growth that couldn’t be ignored, a grapefruit-sized mass inside Mom’s abdomen made all the jabbing, jostling and frenetic pace of those early weeks necessary.  She had to endure relentless, throbbing and occasionally spasmotic pain. It meant that even small, reflexive movements—pulling a shirt over her head, sliding into her elastic-waist slacks, or the back and forth motions of soap and a wash cloth—hurt like hell.  To complete any one of those seemingly ordinary movements of everyday life, required that Mom first steel herself against sharp, bone-crushing pain.  And the medicine prescribed to relieve it?  Tylenol with codeine: as effective as an aspirin for a root canal.

And then there was the surgery itself. Plucking the tumor from Mom’s abdomen would mean additional stress on her heart, stress that compromised her heart’s viability. She’d already experienced a massive heart attack four years earlier.  How could going under the knife a second time be anything but folly? Just how touch and go her life had been back then was evident in an 11th hour phone call from the hospital.  I was staying near the hospital in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina.

“M’am, your mother’s vital signs aren’t good,” was the understatement I heard from a hospital staffer.  “We think you should come right away.”  “I’m leaving right now,” I told her simply, too stunned to say anything else.

I paused a moment, trying to comprehend the news, but panic had begun to set in.  Would the hospital try to reach me moments after I left the hotel room? Gathering up our four month old baby and a diaper bag, I raced out of the hotel room. Was I going to have time to say goodbye?