Chapter Twelve

The Calm Before the Storm

Somehow you always know when a storm is brewing on the horizon; the atmosphere eerily changes.

Mom came home but she was so weak now. She was in the hospital for two weeks on very strong antibiotics. For the first time, she couldn’t walk without assistance. She had pain and showed it; she was always able to hide the pain before. She had never been this weak, and she slept most of the time. She was so tired and had no energy. Coming home after being in the hospital for so long gave us an opportunity to gauge the progression of the disease. Simple tasks that she could do at home before, such as walk from outside to inside or from the den to the bedroom, she could no longer do. I couldn’t believe how quickly Mom had declined. From the moment they told her that the cancer had spread and they were releasing her to hospice, she gave up all hope. She had no idea it would take her so soon; neither did we.

We came home with Mom on a Sunday afternoon. Her two closest sisters were waiting at the house with Dad when we arrived home. After we helped her walk into the house, we could see the shock in her sisters’ faces when they saw her. Everyone had expected her to come home from the hospital fixed, not more broken. One sister started to cry in the background, nearly silently. It was heartbreaking. I prayed Mom didn’t hear her.

I was to spend the day with Mom, and my sister planned to handle a Social Security call for Mom that morning. My sister and I arrived Tuesday morning to a locked door. When we got inside and went into her bedroom to say good morning, we found her in extreme pain—writhing in pain. Dad said she had been up most of the night in pain. She looked at me and her face was so twisted with pain that I just couldn’t bear it. She cried weakly to me, “The pain is so bad…I hate living like this.” It devastated me that she was in pain all night and I didn’t know. I had to get her out of pain—and I had to do it now.
I got on the phone with the hospital trying to find Mom’s doctor, and then I was referred to hospice. I was trying to hear the person on the other end of the phone while of course getting the HMO runaround. Dad sat at the dining room table and tried to pretend that this morning was as normal as any other. My sister nervously paced around in the kitchen while she loudly talked to Social Security on her cell phone. The neighbor walked in and Mom’s dogs started barking. I couldn’t hear a thing on the phone, and I absolutely lost it. I had to get the house less hectic and quieter in order to operate.

I finally got through to hospice to get Mom her first prescription of morphine; then, I sent Dad to the hospital to retrieve it. It gave him some way to help and something to do (and got him out of my hair). I asked my sister to go to work; her cell phone kept ringing and was driving me crazy. It’s nothing personal; I love my sister and I know she was doing her best to help. But I just couldn’t focus with all the distractions. Even though it devastated me to see my mom in this state, I put my feelings aside and made my body and brain go into overdrive to get her help. I then concentrated on getting some food into Mom’s stomach so that I could give her some pain medication that we had on hand.

Many times, I had hated the fact that Mom argued with me every time I tried to encourage her to take the pain medication before the pain was bad. It got to be a very old argument between us. That morning, though, she wasn’t arguing with me. I finally got a little food and a pill into her, which helped a little while we waited for the morphine...

Available at fine bookstores
everywhere