Searching For Phantom Limb, Finding Herself

Alida V. Camacho

found my mother weeping. Although I had seen her in distress many times before, this time was different. In many ways, it was reflection of new things to come.

For twenty minutes in frustration, she sobbed for a right hand that had vanished. Is it possible that her hand had simply swam downstream? Downstream where the river is shallow and the scorching sun reaches the bottom of the stream? Yes, a magical place. It was ‘un lago’ in Patillas, Puerto Rico where my mother’s 91 year old sister Maria and she once swam? She glanced to her right, left, and to the foundation of her hospital bed. Her right hand was nowhere to be found. Could it also mean that her right hand absconded, longing to unearth moments of a precious early day where she played in the park with her three children, Nuno, Tita, and Lila?

My mother still searched in vain for that appendage she had perhaps taken for granted. She peered throughout her room. Searching for clues. Searching for the fill of now disconcerting void. Still, her right hand was nowhere to be found.

My mother is battling brain cancer, whose mélange of symptoms include the loss of movement in the right arm and right leg. Like most brain cancer, my mother’s disease effected critical neurological pathways, which resulted in an invasion and compression to brain tissue. The result-right-sided hemiplegia, a devasting secondary complication of this cancerous scourge. Downheartedly, her next path was an inability to distinguish that her right hand is attached to her wrist since the tumor that had begun to press against her skull, caused a break in the natural connection between the hemispheres of the brain and as a result, mom is unable to comprehend the difference.

In a tone of exasperation, my mother claimed that her ‘lost’ right hand was detached from her wrist and was running far from her, far from her inner tranquility and contentment she had begun to feel.

My mother would ask: “Why have you disappeared from sight? You understand I have been working hard to find you?” At that moment, in an almost state of revelation, my mother stumbled upon that most mischievous right hand. Soon, much as our own despair began to fall, a smile of triumph surfaced on my mother’s face as she hastily snatched the missing rascal with the other hand as if it were a winning lottery ticket.

In an effort to give my mother an empowering buffer to such episodes (which we knew would become less common with treatment), I placed a scintillating bracelet around her wrist to make it “stress-free” during the next time mom’s right hand intends to cause mischief. Mom looked at me with eyes of gratitude. Still, she held fast to her glare of her right hand. She knew this stare would render it immobile to its dastardly ways.

Soon, my mother found gratification knowing that her new glittering bracelet will serve as a messenger from her belabored left hemisphere brain that her right hand was still close by. Finally capturing her lost treasure, she embraced it both sternly and a resignation that her body was a wondrous machine of folly, surprise, and gratitude.