I stood in the darkened room and watched the technician's monitor as they took stills of my mother's internal organs. I fought my own dizziness as they told her to inhale and I, following suit, forgot to exhale. "Your liver is really filled with cancer," she kept saying. You don't say? Thanks.

But then, she left, and the doctor, a "man" who made Doogie Howser look ancient, came in to capture a still that the technician could not. He looked, and he looked, and he looked...and he could not find what he was looking for either.

We walked away from that darkened room, and Mom was depressed over the repeated mention of the cancer in her liver. I don't know if it was genius or folly on my part, but my unchecked response was to say, "Screw the cancer...you've got bigger problems. The hospital has lost your pancreas."