As August approached along with our week of vacation I got nervous.  I was scared to go too far from home.  Mom just seemed on the edge.   But what edge we didn’t know.  Mom had a CT Scan of her abdomen at the end of July “just to be sure”.  Even though the breast tumor had been found the doctor wanted to be sure there wasn’t something else lurking to explain Mom’s quickly failing health.  Pasith and I were leaving on our trip on the Monday but the doctor requested to see Mom that day so we drove south to Steinbach before heading west.  Mom, my sister and I went in to hear what the scan results were.   I had done this enough times that I knew if it was requested that Mom bring her daughters it couldn’t be good.  There were “nodules” found in her abdomen; all over her abdomen.  Not contained in a particular organ but on the outside of them.  When asked if the nodules were cancer the doctor answered with the obligatory response of “we won’t know without a biopsy”.  Well I had my answer.  Mom took it in stride as she had everything else that summer.  It was a combination of not understanding and not wanting to ask to gain understanding.

After the appointment we took Mom back to her apartment and she just looked sick and tired.  She had a hard time walking or talking and requested to just go inside.  Auntie A helped her up the 3 steps and my sister, Pasith and I took a walk.  I was having a terrible feeling about going away but was told to go and have a good time.  Everything would be fine.  My sister and I discussed the “nodules” and what it could mean.  The analogy that came to my mind was one we had used with Pasith’s Dad during his first major emergency.  That first jolt is like you are suddenly rolling down a hill out of control.  You land at the bottom looking up into the faces of doctors and nurses who now control your life.  Your life is no longer your own.  The bottom was coming.

Pasith and I left and I was sick as we drove away not knowing if I was going to regret this decision to go on vacation at this time.  We went to Minnedosa, Manitoba to lie on the beach for a few days and the weather was perfect.  Being in a remote location our cell service was spotty, especially in the hotel.  So on Tuesday morning when I saw that there was a text from my sister saying Mom was in the ambulance on her way to St Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg it was a horrible jolt.  And the text was over an hour old.  I ran around the lobby of the hotel trying to find a signal to call her back.  Mom had gotten up in the middle of the night and started throwing up, really bad ugly stuff.  She woke up Auntie A to take her across the street to the hospital.  By the time she got there she was in very bad condition and they were discussing surgery but the surgeons in Steinbach aren’t trained for specialized intestinal surgery.  So they decided to send her to Winnipeg not knowing if she would survive the ambulance ride.  Auntie went back to my Mom’s and collected a few things and took off behind the ambulance.  My Aunt can describe this scene much better than I can since she was there but I just know that it was a grave situation.  They got Mom settled in with a tube down her nose into her stomach and tubes coming out of just about everywhere.  The doctors decided she wasn’t stable enough for surgery they would have to wait.  She wasn’t allowed any food or drink, just ice chips.  My Mom was at the bottom of the hill looking up.