The Indian American

watched TV. My brother called her twice a day, as did I, and he visited. Friends came over. Some weekends, we took the bus to the Target in Columbia Heights, where we browsed the wares. My mom loved bags and liked shopping for them. Over the years, I had bought her numerous bags, which she would promptly gift to her nieces and friends. There were bad days, too, of course. The worst were the days when the scan results came in, because they never brought good news. The tumors were continuing to grow. - - - I know my mom missed her home in India, her familiar routine, her family, friends and neighbors. It wasn't easy for her at nearly 80 to adjust to a new country and a new life. But she never complained, never demanded to return and, when asked how she was, she would invariably say, "My chil- dren are here, and where they are, I am happy." Because my mom continued to seem healthy, we held out the hope that some treatment would work and that one day she could return to India, even if for only a few months. We held on to that even after she began coughing, losing her appetite and grew more tired. The last trial she was in, at the National Institutes of Health, was hard: The medication would give her chills that she described as ice inside her bones. For Thanksgiving 2014, my brother, sis- ter-in-law and their two young kids came to visit. In pictures taken then, my mom looks frail. But since I was used to seeing her every day, I had not noticed. My brother brought up the idea of getting a nurse or similar caregiver to watch over her while I was at work, to make sure she ate and took her medication for the cough. But the morning of the day my brother and his family were to return home, my mom started coughing up blood, and we rushed her to the emergency room. The tumors were now much larger, and they irritated her airway, making her cough and exhausting her. Admitted to the hospital's intensive care unit, she slept most hours and ate very little. Soon she slipped into unconsciousness. We arranged with hospice care to move her back to my apartment with a hospital bed and morphine to keep her comfortable and an oxygen tank to help her breathe. Although our mom never spoke again, we could see that she was much more relaxed away from the lights, sounds and constant movement in the intensive care unit. For four days, we watched over her, talked to her even though she was unconscious, changed her gown, brushed her soft silver hair and held her hand. On the fourth night, she died, as my brother and I sat beside her. My brother and I feel grateful that we could be there for our mom, that we could arrange for her to receive quality care and that our family could afford to pay for it. And we could do all this because of world- class hospitals and physicians in the United States, American laws related to health care and immigration, and supportive bosses and colleagues. - - - We learned some lessons from this expe- rience that may help others with sick rela- tives in far-off locales. 1. The travel insurance that many people buy when they visit the United States as tourists usually does not cover preexisting conditions. If your loved one is a U.S. citi- zen or has a green card, there are insurance 20 THE INDIAN AMERICAN OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2018