I'm still camped out on mom's living room floor. This morning I got back from an appointment at the family clinic (sinuses) to find a nurse from the home care company interviewing mom for enrollment in hospice care. The nurse asked when the first diagnosis of mom's cancer was made. Early May of this year, it was. She marveled at how much had come upon us so fast. I still marvel at that same thing.

One day she couldn't swallow food. There had been months of treatment for acid reflux but nothing to indicate something more severe. So the doctor ordered an endoscopy, which turned out to be the test through which the cancer presented itself. In retrospect, I can see how the disease has been simmering for years. The concept of how the cancer "presents itself" came from an oncologist on the team that came to treat mom's miseries. The term "miseries" came from a different oncologist on that same team. It was a bright spot of humor in a pretty shadowy journey, when Dr. Greenfield looked at mom and said, "You've got yourself a case of the miseries!".

So the tumor became known through an image while it's nature as cancer was revealed in the biopsy that was done with tissue taken during the endoscopy. When I took mom back to her physician he quite somberly released her care to the oncological team. The appointment was two weeks away. Mom lost another ten pounds in that time, although she was still able to swallow liquid. I got her an organic powered full spectrum food mix but it didn't do much in the face of all the trauma and worries.

When we finally met with an oncologist he immediately arranged for her to go into a regional hospital in Santa Fe, where they did a CAT scan and implanted that food tube, peg tube, that I have come to know so well. It's a flexible plastic tube that goes through her abdominal wall and into her stomach. This allows us to pull a fast one on that nasty donut shaped tumor that now fully chokes her esophagus.

I was called down to Santa Fe on the third day of the hospital stay. The oncologist wanted to meet with me. I walked into her room at the hospital to find her looking very haggard and somewhat wild-eyed. The duty nurse came soon and informed me that mom was quite agitated. "Does she drink?!". Mom had given her fits the day before, when after swallowing some cherry jello mom celebrated the swallowing by slipping into the bathroom and lighting up an American Spirit non-filter cigarette. They obviously had butted heads over that transgression, and mom had taken to calling the nurse Nurse Rachett, as in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". "No", I told the nurse, with a chuckle, "It's been 20 years since she drank any alcohol".

But arrangements were made for me to bring her home the following day. The oncologist, in spite of the difficulty he had in relaying the prognosis, was impressive in his organizational assistence. So when I got to the hospital the next day there were six cases of canned liquid medical grade food - Fibersource - an IV stand, a state of the art digital enteral pump, plastic feed bags with the full paraphenalia attached, IV sponges, syringes, and tape. Included was an instruction manual for the whole system, highlighted in yellow where pertinent information was to be located.

I was fully dazzled by all of this!! Ninety miles from home, seeing my mother as near to death as I could ever have imagined, and me being plied with large amounts of information as to where we were to proceed from there. The oncologist had impressed me as well, with his somewhat cocky demeanor, and also with the telling of how his own father had succumbed to a similar situation - after 18 months of tube feeding. The cancer, said the doc, was not what killed him. It was inadequate nutrition. Fine! I loaded all the feeding supplies into my car then met mom at the hospital entrance where a fine young orderly had wheeled her out into the beautiful morning. "No smoking in the car", the young man said. Then with a wink he added, "At least not the legal stuff".

In addition to the sustainence IV they had also kept mom downed with morphine. So she was well into the borderlands of the Dreamtime as I drove her back north toward home. As we passed beyond San Juan Pueblo with their little casino, and on toward the place where the highway enters the Rio Grande Gorge, mom began to tell me about all the many dead birds she was seeing along side of the road. White birds, on their backs, with their black legs and feet pointing up towards the vast blue sky. I looked but saw no such things - it sounded like cartoon images to me. Chills scurried across my skin as I realized that dreamtime images were appearing to her. She was having a vision, and I felt it might mean that she was close to death. What I did not realize was that a brush with death is only a brush. Weeks later, after a day of testing at UNMH in Albuquerque, we again passed by that prairie place where mom had seen dead birds. Scattered across that field, entangled in the sage brush, were dozens of common white plastic grocery bags. The morphine dreams had allowed her to see these bags as dead birds.

I've no doubt that she was close to death that day. My fondness for the adventure of the Dreamtime notwithstanding, it was a vision that was to color my perception for weeks to come. I got her home that day, and a home care nurse showed up that evening. Together, we went over the instruction manual. That is how I learned to administer artificial food to mom. I've been camped out on her living room floor since then. Tomorrow she becomes enrolled in hospice care. The rigors and trauma of the multiple tests at UNMH turned her attitude around. She'd had enough of the modern medical showcase. Said she'd rather stay home and see what nature has in store. Her health is pretty good, considering.