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This extract is about Dave Eggers' mother and her illness, "they took my mothers stomach out about six months ago..." suggesting she is seriously, terminally ill. Eggers' plays with various tenses and speaks of this as if it was literally six months ago, this shows his memory of his mother and her illness is very raw and it is still there, clear. Eggers states "there wasn't a lot left to remove" this shows his mother has had her stomach removed gradually to get rid of the illness. "They tied the [something] to the [something], hoped that they had removed the offending portion" the use of the parentheses, shows he hasn't got the language to described explicitly what the medial terms are because he does not care for them, he is less interested in the scientific side of it and is more interested in the literary side. Eggers' mother goes onto chemotherapy and later finds out the doctors didn't remove all of the cancer and unfortunately it had grown and spread across her body. "It had grown, it had come back, it had laid eggs" the use of repetition triad "it had", describes the process of the cancer growing and Eggers' refers the cancer to an alien "it was stuck to the side of the spaceship." Eggers talks of his mothers progress during cancer and how she wore wigs while her hair began to grow back, as if she is getting better however "six months later she began to have the pain again" he asked "was it indigestion?" this shows Eggers' hope that his mother is not getting worse again, he knows the cancers back however he uses indigestion as a way of hope.
KEY THEMES: death, family relationships and change.
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