I spoke too soon.

I got a phone call from my mom who was visiting friends in NC--"I've been admitted to the hospital--bowel obstruction." I packed my daughter in the car, loaded up the gear, and drove on. I thought we had been through the worst, but no, not really.

I found a woman who was not really my mother balled up terrible pain. Fetal position, grasping a leg that wouldn't straighten out. We would learn later that she had shingles running the length of her sciatic nerve when the blisters finally erupted, but at this point, we didn't know. We also didn't know that the radiation treatment had fried her small intestines up like a funnel cake. What we knew was that she was losing weight and not able to eat. The doctors decided to let her bowel rest, and gave her pain medication. Lots of it. But it barely made a dent. So, she became someone who frightened me.

Mom's best friend, MJ, cared for her, there in the hospital a good 4 1/2 hours drive from my home. I joined MJ, never having felt the pull in two different directions as much as now. My daughter couldn't come to the hospital--my mom didn't want the little one to see her with a tube in her nose. So, she stayed with my stepmother while I was at the hospital. But I missed her while I was at my mother's side, and then I missed my mother when I went home to care for my daughter. The tension between the two competing demands on my time was never more clear as I rushed from one to the other.

Eventually, she needed to be moved so she could be under her own doctor's care. MJ made a comfortable bed in her SUV, and put my mom in the back, stacks of syringes filled with morphine next to her. Since my mom is a nurse, the doctors trusted her to be able to self-medicate and put that yellowish fluid into a tube that ran from her shoulder into her jugular (her port). I was hesitant about the whole becoming an ambulance thing, but everyone else seemed confident this would work. So, my daughter and I followed behind in my car.

My daughter was a champ. She was indeed concerned about the tube in her grandmother's nose, as we thought she would be, but instead of expressing fear or disgust, she cocked her head and asked, "Can you smell with that in there?" Then she climbed up into bed with her "Mommy's Mom" or, as she calls her "MommyMom, for a snuggle. We started the trip with confidence.

All was well until about 3 hours later. Mom had fallen asleep, and, therefore, had gotten behind on her pain meds. She awoke in intense pain. We pulled over into an abandoned gas station to let Mom give herself the morphine. Like a junkie needing a fix, mom's hands shook as she took out the first syringe. She wasted it. But as she reached for another, she forgot that she had opened up the clamp for the tube. As she frantically tried to get that moving tube to line up with the shaking syringe, I saw deep red blood flowing out onto the pillows, mattress, and blanket from the other line--directly from the largest vein in her body. I couldn't breathe. Not that I am afraid of blood. Far from it. But at that moment, I realized, she could die right here. Right now. Along the side of the road somewhere in the middle of nowhere South Carolina.

I pointed to the blood, and mom quickly clamped the line. Her blood stopped, but mine kept racing, making me dizzy with complete and utter incompetence. If she had passed out, would I have known how to stop the blood? MJ and I looked at each other in perfect understanding. Oh, my god.

We made it to the hospital, triumphant in our arrival. But I never let a medical procedure go by after this without watching so I could do it myself--if I had to.