We will not be publishing the name of the rehabilitation center. My sister was reacting without getting her facts first. The doctor in attendance says Mother did not have pneumonia when she left the center. The attending doctor at the hospital she was transferred to says she did not have pneumonia. That does not excuse the rehabilitation center for not calling Patricia when things didn't happen as planned.

Mother is now a patient at a nursing home about four minutes from Patricia's home, and maybe eight minutes from her work, as opposed to Mother's house 25 miles across town. A 50-mile round-trip across Dallas is not the optimal way to end a working woman's day. The home is clean and friendly, with many kind and cheerful people to look after everyone.

Patricia decided, and I concur, to bring a hospice facility into Mother's case. The hospice nurse who first looked over her chart explained to us that at this stage of Mother's disease, pneumonia and other pulmonary illnesses cannot be eradicated. Her lungs are warm, dark and filled with fluid, and there are no drugs strong enough to rid her of illnesses.

Mother will eventually drown in her own lung fluids. The treatment now is to give her morphine derivatives and other anti-anxiety drugs to quell panic. She compared Mother's experience to being dropped into the deep end of a swimming pool and not being able to reach the surface.

When I left yesterday, Mother was quiet and lucid. It has been a roller coaster ride as they've tried to find the proper dosage of drugs. Medicine is still a hit or miss thing in her case. They're not helped by the fact that Mother has never been drunk more than once or twice (when I was a little girl she had some champagne with the neighbor next door and set the kitchen trash on fire when she cooked dinner that night) and never took so much as a tranquilizer to affect her mind. Mother has always dreaded being "drugged-up" and left in a nursing home to die.

So that's where Mother is.

I'll write more about Dallas later. I found that I've become quite the country mouse.