It’s been a terrifying week, actually. Tuesday night, after a day of running errands and feeling fine, my mom got a terrible stomach ache after dinner.

“I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” she said, sitting in the rocker in the living room.

“You just sit there and I’ll do the dishes.”

“Okay. It really does hurt, but it usually goes away in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

She’s been having these stomach aches after dinner for a couple of weeks, you see, but they always go away after a short while. This one was persistent.

So I did the dishes and I realized she’d been quiet for a long time. I came in to check on her and she’d passed out. I don’t just mean a little faint—she was gone. Completely unresponsive, head slumped forward, pale, clammy, cold. In fact, I thought she was dead for a few terrifying moments until I picked up a pulse. I jumped for the phone to call 911, but her head lolled back and she made this scary aspiration sound, so I tipped it forward again, and she got sick, and then she started to revive a little, but by that time I had the paramedics on the way and the 911 operator on the line. They got there really fast and she was wuzzy but talking a little by then. By the time one of the nice firemen and I had gathered up her medicines and they’d loaded her on the stretcher, she was actually sort of chatty. The paramedic said they’d stabilize her in the ambulance, but it looked like she’d be okay, then they transported her and I followed in my car.

Something must have been in the air that night because the local hospital E-room was full up, as were many of the others except Brotman, which is a horrible place, and when the paramedic mentioned it, Mom declared, “I’m not going to Brotman! Don’t take me there!” Which actually unknotted some of the sheer terror in my stomach a little if she was being that adamant. They managed to get her into Santa Monica-UCLA, but even that was almost full. On the drive there, I passed three other ambulances in full cry.

She was very thoroughly checked out at Santa Monica. They couldn’t find anything sinister going on until they did a CAT scan of stomach and then they found an undiagnosed stomach issue—the doctor described it as a kind a hardening of the arteries in the intestines so that she wasn’t getting enough blood in her stomach when trying to digest food. That’s what had been giving her stomach aches. Blood thinners and smaller meals will help with that issue. I’d had a bout of 24-hour stomach virus the previous week, and that may have been contributing to things. She had the same symptoms as me in the following day and a half.

Why did she pass out in such a scary fashion? The pain this time had been more intense than previous times and the doctor’s theory is that she passed out from the pain. Her heart is sound, her BP had come back up, she’d stabilized, so at 2 a.m. we took a taxi home from the hospital.

Don’t get me started on the parking problems around Santa Monica hospital. There is no emergency room parking longer than 20 minutes. I had to walk a block and a half in the dark from a $10 parking structure to get to the emergency room and I wasn’t about to repeat that at 2 a.m. It all seemed quite minor compared to what we’d gone through earlier, and I was so grateful to be taking her home again I didn’t worry about it. I was still grateful the next day, but rather “perturbed” when a neighbor gave me a ride to pick up my car. I’d pulled into a legal visitor’s parking space okay, but it was one of those double ones and I didn’t pull all the way to the wall. They had booted my car and were going to tow it. I don’t usually do the hysterical female thing because it’s just not my way, but I pulled that trick out of the bag that day and launched it on them. Besides, I was in a legal space. They unbooted my car and let me drive away.

Mom was quite sick for a few days and her primary care doctor said to keep her hydrated, but don’t force the eating issue too much. She managed to start eating (albeit lightly) by yesterday so I thought I might actually go to work today, but then the stress caught up with me and slammed me. I haven’t felt at all well today and stayed home. She’s alert, eating (still lightly), and we’re going to her doctor next week.

But I can’t quite leave that terror behind. Somewhere in me there’s a post on death and dying wanting to be written and the cycle of life, but not now. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to face that one. Who ever is ready for that one?