heart and lungs

I went to the hospital immediately upon arriving this evening. My mom had just finished eating some dinner. She looked much better than I thought she would--much less edema in her legs and face. She was sitting up in bed and I sat next to her and we hugged--long and strong, a few times. She kept pulling me back to her giddily--loopy from the pain meds. She remained lucid throughout the visit ... just a little loopy. High. I didn't fight it. I let her pull me back, each time, and laughed with her. It feels good to be back here again.

The news I learned today is that she is now in danger of heart and lung failure. She's been having a hard time breathing, and the sense that we've gotten (her damned doctor just sugarcoats everything and what my aunt was able to learn was largely from the nurses--one who was a former patient of my mom's) is that the tumors in her lungs are growing and are threatening to crowd out her heart. We knew this information earlier, right?--about the tumor close to her heart. But we were so much concentrating on her liver that we let slip her heart and lungs. My mom told my aunt, "Of all the ways that I thought I might die, I never thought it would be from heart failure."

It's strange to be in these hospitals where my mom once worked--where she once brought life into the world. I can't imagine what it's like for her--seeing nurses, former patients, lab technicians. My aunt was telling me that a lab tech went up to her and said, "Is that ... Dr. Mahato?" I think about what my mom use to look like--with her long curls and her silk suits and her doctor's coat. So poised and so proud. Patients would come up to us in malls, restaurants, parking lots, and say to me, "Your mom is so incredible." It's strange to see her so weak. I remember so clearly this one day when she came home from surgery--I must have been thirteen or fourteen--and she showed me, triumphantly, this polaroid of a benign tumor she had just removed from a patient's uterus. She said, "It was the size of a watermelon!"