(MONEY Magazine) – I couldn't figure out what I was hearing. It was a sort of cooing sound, almost like a mourning dove. I was trying to reach my mother's hospital room at the Clinica Santa Maria in Santiago, Chile, but someone had picked up the phone and left it off the hook. Only when I heard the noise turn into my mother's voice did I realize that I'd been listening to her moan in pain.

My 68-year-old mother was a 15-hour flight away, immobilized, with two fractures in her sacrum (the triangular bone that forms the posterior section of the pelvis, according to my dictionary). It was a bad situation but could have been worse. She wasn't paralyzed, which was my immediate concern. And her travel group, Explore Worldwide of Hampshire, England, had required members of the 20-day trip to the Patagonia region of Chile to buy medical-evacuation insurance. Over the course of 10 days last January, I learned that a $200 premium for six weeks of coverage is one hell of an investment, especially when you're traveling somewhere relatively remote. While the process of flying my mother home on a stretcher was far from smooth, I don't know how my sisters and I would have coped without insurance. Here's how things worked for us--and key lessons that we had to learn the hard way. (For tips on buying a policy and an overview of credit-card assistance, see the boxes on pages 277 and 278.)

Jan. 16, 1999: My mother calls my sister Lisa from a small clinic in Punta Arenas, near the southernmost tip of Chile. Yesterday morning, she'd been sitting on a fast tour boat traveling in high winds over a choppy bay, en route to the glacier on the slopes of Monte Balmaceda, when the impact of a wave sent her flying into the air; her sacrum hit the edge of a platform. My mother directs my sister to a folder in her filing cabinet labeled "Chile." It holds her insurance policy for the trip, which was issued by a subsidiary of American International Group (AIG). That leads to my simple but crucial No. 1 tip for anyone buying insurance: Tell family members you have it and leave them a copy of the policy.

Jan. 19: My phone contacts at the medical-evacuation company keep saying that my mother could fly out tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. Are they dragging their feet to find a cheaper flight or is there a legitimate reason for the delay? Another frustration: Every day there seems to be a new person handling my mother's case.

Jan. 20: The day of that horrible phone call to my mother's hospital room. Right afterward, I buy an airline ticket for the next evening ($1,762, round trip from New York City). Tip No. 2: If I'd read my mother's policy, I'd have found that it covers as much as $1,500 in expenses for a bedside visit if a doctor (the insurance company's doctor, I presume) deems the trip necessary.

Jan. 21: Before I leave, the people in the U.S. handling my mother's case tell me that part of the delay stems from the difficulty of getting a "stretcher flight." The evacuation company has to book nine seats for the two legs of the trip (we switch planes in Buenos Aires). If those seats cost as much as mine, that's a $16,000 trip. The seats will be folded over so that a special stretcher can be attached to the arms of the middle seats. I'm told of another hitch: The airline, Aerolineas Argentinas, has to borrow a stretcher.

Jan. 22: When I arrive, I learn there's been a medical reason not to evacuate my mother right away. Three days earlier, a doctor at the Punta Arenas clinic had arranged to move her to a better-equipped clinic in Santiago. But getting her from the Punta Arenas clinic to the airport had involved a bumpy ambulance ride--on the heels of a bumpy ride to the clinic the day of the accident. The Santiago doctor wants her to stabilize before being moved again.

I also hear that right before my mother was set to leave the Punta Arenas clinic, she was presented with a bill for more than $2,000, only to find that it exceeded her credit-card limit. My sister solved the problem by giving her own credit-card number over the phone. Tip No. 3, from this part of the story: Raising your credit line before a trip can pay. I'd say $10,000 should be the minimum. Mom's medical bills in Chile--which eventually were all reimbursed, minus a $50 deductible--came to more than $7,000.

Meantime, I'm feeling pretty ineffectual--the nurses joke with my mother about my pantomimed requests to increase her pain medication. The best I can do is take over hospital/insurance company go-between duties. (My mother has found all the international phone calls to the insurance company to be exhausting.)

Jan. 23: We may have a flight out tomorrow. The nurse who'll escort us home has arrived. Elaine, who normally works in an emergency room in Montreal, seems perfectly competent, but because she doesn't speak Spanish, she can't communicate with the Chilean nurses. I go to settle the hospital bill and in my exhausted, stressed-out state have a moment of utter incredulity and panic when I see that the bill is for 2 million. Then I remember we're talking pesos--about $5,000. Back at the hotel, I flip on the TV and find myself falling asleep to the rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, dubbed in Spanish.

Jan. 24: Just an hour before we're scheduled to leave, a new problem crops up. The moaning I'd heard on the phone four days ago was my mother trying to curl up to be given an epidural line that would allow medication to be injected into a tube. But our nurse escort isn't licensed to handle epidural lines, which, I gather, can migrate in transit. Our doctor in Chile comes up with a solution: some supposedly super-duper pain reliever that the nurse can inject during the flight. Elaine checks out the drug over the phone with her supervisor, the Chilean nurse removes the epidural line, and we're off.

Jan. 25: Home, at last. We take our last ambulance ride, to a New Jersey hospital.

Feb. 26: Mom is well enough to leave her rehabilitation center and move home.

Oct. 1: My mother is back to hiking, swimming and doing yoga. But there's one more ordeal: She calculates that it took four months, innumerable calls and one strongly worded letter copied to scores of state regulators to get reimbursed. (While not commenting on Mom's claim, an AIG spokesman says, "There are many factors determining the time it takes to get a claim paid, such as severity of the injury and the speed with which overseas providers send us information.") Pleasantly, her travel group, Explore Worldwide, stepped in to help speed things up.

Oct. 20: My mother is planning her next overseas trip--and buying another medical-evacuation policy.