Painful Despedida

It is still fresh in my mind how I saw my mom dying slowly on her deathbed. It was just four days ago that I have spoke to her heart to heart. Her remote memories slowly ebbed away as the pea size tumor on her head gradually grows and compressed her fragile brain.

It was three years ago, that I've seen her a little stronger and able to respond well to conversation but with slight memory lapses. But she looks too well, that she can walk without assistance. Her thin and scrawny structure appears alarming but she is as healthy as a running horse.

Now that I came back after three years, she looks gaunt and emaciated. Added to that she looks dehydrated and acidotic to look at. She was chasing her breath and her cough appeared real tight and non-productive. She appears to be gasping and out of breath which necessitates her to be placed on oxygen via a nasal cannula. Her breath sounds when auscultated sounded wheezy and tight, as if her airways clamped down and become constricted in her every effort to breath in air and sustain her fragile body with needed oxygen.

I was suspecting she accumulated some fluids in her vulnerable lungs. I can hear the gurgling sound everytime she takes in air. I am imagining a fish who got out of the bowl and was gasping for air and water racing its tiny mouth for every tiny bit of air it can get to survive temporarily. As if she was drowned in a tub of water and struggling for air.

On a Friday morning at 3 am she complained to me that her chest was painful everytime she coughs. I calmed her down and assured her that I will secure a prescription for a cough medicine. I told her that I will just go out the room and buy her cough medicine. But when I came back and about to give her the cough syrup I noticed that she was already unconscious and her nails appears bluish and cyanotic.

I then tapped her face and do everything I could to arouse her but she's not responding to my call. Her senses were now robbed and panicked set in with me.

I realized that she is hypoxic so I crank up the oxygen to a maximum as much as possible. Then called for the doctor and told her what had happened. When I came back to the room I immediately grabbed the nebulizer and gave her some aerosol treatments. The aminophylline drip was been increased to aid in dilating her airways but still to no avail. After giving the treatments she started to open up again but still not arousable. I waited for a little while and then I come into terms that she will gave way anytime soon, on the day of my departure.

I am leaving that day at 10 am, bound to go back to America, to start my three weeks sojourn to France. And I know it was a bad timing because of my mom's bad condition. I can't do otherwise but to continue my trip or else worse comes to worse I will make some ammedments if something bad happen.

I left the hospital and left my mom with the caretaker and headed to tell all my siblings to prepare for something worse. I also told my mom's aunt what I am expecting and that I want her to take care of everything, when I am gone, if something omimous will happen and assured her that I will come back soon if worse comes to worse.

Then my gut feeling was right. I was in Guam when my plane had a lay over and then the black crows started to squawk heralding me the bad news. The weather in Guam was overcast and it was raining in the Philippines when I left. The skies was cryng when I left the Philippines announcing me the bad omen but I told myself to be strong and be ready for whatever will happen.

I came back to Los Angeles at 5 am on a Saturday morning, a day after when my mom passed away. I want to cry but I couldn't. I felt so numb and anesthetized with my memories with her when I took care of her at the hospital. I was still in shock and denial, and my lonely room added some sense of loneliness and emptiness to me, so I called my best friend and pleaded to him to let me stay at his place for a night, which he totally understood. I opened my facebook and all the outpouring of support and sympathies were been made by my nearest relatives and close friends which even made me feel so homesick and lonely.

So I went to church and prayed there for hours, sobbed, and cried alone. Then there I felt good because my bottled emotions were all been released and came undone.

I called back home and checked for their situation. And I then decided to postpone my trip to France and pledge to take care of this family tragedy first and then plan to travel at a later time.

My second homecoming will commence this comming Friday and now I will see my mom lying cold in a suffocating and narrow coffin. She could not hear me anymore and couldn't feel that I care for her. She is officially dead now and I couldn't show her what I feel. It was a painful goodbye for me and I know I will surely missed her.

I know she is with her Creator and happily waiting for me in the other part of life.