My mother hallucinated when she got really sick. It was either the narcotics or too much calcium in her blood (interfering with the brain's functions). Doesn't really matter what the cause. Although I did argue with the health care professionals who would use her delusions as an excuse to try to take away the drugs.

Because she really did hurt.

I never knew how to assess her pain. From around Christmas 2001 until she was hospitalized with a bowel obstruction in late May 2002 she complained of all kinds of pain. Chest pain, back pain. She said at one point that her legs hurt too bad to walk. She actually refused to walk for several days. She said it felt like knives. She burned herself using a heating pad on her back trying to relieve the pain. At one point she said she thought her back was broken.

She got diagnoses. Maybe it was a growth in her lung. There was a growth there, but it wasn't growing. Maybe the hormones they gave her made her breasts enlarge and were hurting her back. Maybe it was postherpetic neuralgia. I didn't remember when she had shingles but she had a couple of rounds of anti-virals. She had frequent infections, too. And had rounds of antibiotics. PT was prescribed and a wheelchair.

My dad finally threw up his hands and took her to an emergency room in the middle of the night with a bowel obstruction. A few days later the health care professionals cleared it without surgery and were feeling good about themselves when they noticed she was sleepy and disoriented. They asked us about pain? Frequent infections? Frequent constipation? They ran blood tests. They pronounced that she had Multiple Myeloma. A plasma cancer that causes many tiny bone fractures. It was the Memorial Day weekend when a doctor explained this possible diagnosis to us. As if her body was suddenly free to experience the disease in its full blown state after getting a diagnosis, she spiraled down and was put in ICU. Excess calcium in her blood from the disease was trying to kill her. They weren't one hundred per cent sure she had it. But they xrayed her skull plate and said that there were dropouts in it typical of the disease. After the holiday they did the bone marrow aspiration that made it official.

But this isn't about her disease. Or the missed and mis-diagnosis. This isn't even about her pain. The pain we didn't really believe in, us or the health care people, until it was known what she had.

No, this piece is about her hallucinations. Some nights she would sleep for thirty seconds and hallucinate for thirty seconds. I'm not kidding. I timed her as I fought to stay awake and keep her from ripping out an IV.

She started hallucinating in the ICU that first weekend after we'd given the enemy a name. She screamed at me to get away from her, that she was dying. It was as if she was afraid I would catch what was killing her. But a lot of the time she was completely obtunded. You'd just watch the machines and worry.

After she was out of ICU, she spent another couple of months in hospitals and from time to time, the calcium in her blood or her narcotics would send her into various different worlds.

She'd tell me with confidence that "they'd all been taken upstairs," That she had gotten a suppository, that she'd lined up with the interns to get them and they were called 'hot pills.'

She'd describe a helicopter landing. In her room. She'd describe the fitting of 'magic shoes' and metal or aluminum rods that allowed her to walk. Something she could not do during physical therapy. In moments of clarity, she still occasionally believed in the magic shoes and rods and asked us to get them for her.

A lot of the delusions had to do with pain and her inability to walk. She had become weak with the disease and from being bedridden for days. She swore her feet were cut off.

The coversations were fascinating.

"What are your shoes doing?" she asked. "Are they coming toward the church?" she probed.

"It's a shame it all has to be so clinically correct," she said.

"Are they going to go to the houses?" she asked.

"Who?" I wonder.

"The walkers," she said.

One day she invented a word.

"Obsidious means that it is too great. Obsidious…that big word makes my teeth hurt."

We had other conversations like this:

"They had a big party," she said.

"Who did, what kind of party?" I asked.

"I was on the back porch in last year's sheets. I never did go in there to find out."

…and…

"She's done silly things before."

"Who?" I asked.

"The young celebrity."

…and…

"Did they get done with their ordeal?"

"Who?" I asked. No answer, so I say, "What ordeal?"

"Building the museum," she said.

"Where?" I probe.

"Downtown Dallas."

My dad visited their friends Maja and Joe often for relief. Mom talked about them in her delusions.

"Maja made cookies for her granddaughter," she said.

"When?" I asked, thinking maybe Maja had been here and reported this but knowing that her granddaughter was in Australia.

"That's what she always does. Maja has four kitchens. Because she loves to work. I don't know anymore. I didn't get to talk to her tonight."

Sometimes I read newspapers and one day I was absorbed in travel sections, dreaming of escaping the hospital and going on cruises, going in search of lost parrots, staying in Hip Hotels. I didn't say a thing about these reveries to my mother who already felt bad that she couldn't leave the hospital and go somewhere. Out of the blue, though, she opened her eyes one day and said, "I need to get well or dead so you can go places." I looked guiltily at the Travel Section in my hand.

Another time she awakened from a pain killer sleep and said, "It's hard to think of everything."

She dreamed of getting steady enough to get a shower or a bath. "We don't want to get cheese in the jaccuzi,"she announced and then, "Let's go to Colorado fishing."

I knew where some of the nonsense came from. People 'oriented her.' They asked her what her name was, where she was and who was president. Once she thought they want to know the president of the hospital.

"Where are you?"

"Seton."

"Who is president?"

What is she supposed to think? She was disturbed not to know the president of the hospital.

She had dreams or delusions or hallucinations with Jenna and Barbara each having a baby and Laura passing out little miniature lanterns encased in concrete. For weeks she remembered this as if it were true. Then she recounted it because it amused us. Then she suddenly had a Dr. Bush. Or so she believed.

I wished they'd quit asking her who was President.

And then she started a company in a one-sided conversation I didn't get to take part in although I did seem to be receiving orders.

"Everybody take a day off. I'm going to start a business with one law. Everybody gets two days off.

"But I'm afraid of this. Crazy girl, can't run the whole world. Tell them all to quit what they are doing and let me make an announcement. What are they going to do to start a new branch of our business. Which we call Quick Making Changes. That affects our company. Go out and make your own. A company has opened up and they call their name Quick to the World, Quick Materials.

"Take it from animals. Food, clothing, anything.

"I want a pretty company to take the name.

"Young at heart, true soul; please go out and meet your goal.

"What about getting the name of these people who want to start a company? Those that want to branch out?

"What is the name of the big company?

"Quick and Easy. Employmentship. Low hours. Good pay. That's a rule. The name of the company is whatever they want to name it. Tell 'em they go out two by two or more through the door. Call all the people in and then we will dismiss them to go to work.

"Write their names on two pieces of paper."

She left this flight of entrepreneuship behind just as I was getting interested in it.

She saw critters as people who hallucinate are supposed to do. But no rats, bugs, snakes or monsters.

"In fact a tree just hit a cat and put the cat to death," she said. "A pretty little white cat." I searched the TV program for the source of this image. It was a soundless church service with an earnest preacher looking into the camera and gesturing with one hand, his Bible in the other.

She asked another time if I saw the horse.

"No, I didn't."

"You know, the horse with the beanie," she said.

She saw goldfish in the room and said they belonged to her great-grandson.

She wanted to be told what was wrong, why she was weak, why she was in pain, why she was confused. I explained about the disease, the bones riddled with lesions.

"Remember how your back and legs and ribs hurt?" I reminded her since sometimes we were succedding in hiding the pain with narcotics. I explained about the calcium in her blood, that the IV and some drugs were supposed to help get it in balance. I told her the calcium made her confused.

She reached out to touch the things she saw that weren't there, in the classic hallucination fashion that my dad called 'picking grapes.'

"See the butterflies," she said. "The calcium butterflies?"

Yes, her hallucinations were rich and mostly gentle and hopeful. She was an optimist at heart, I guess. The calcium butterfly came and took her one more step away. No more embarrassing hallucinations. No more responses at all. And then: death. But that one moment of delusion, taking flight on my explanation of her disease, sums it up for me.

The calcium butterfly.