What does Lily become conscious of as she lays in bed waiting for death in the novel, How the Dead Live?

As Lily lies in bed, waiting to die, she becomes highly conscious of her own body, its weight, its decay, even its pleasures. At times, her body becomes terrifying and "other." When Lily becomes convinced that the cancer has taken over her liver, she speaks of this as a sort of revolution in metaphors taken from the exterior world: "like a filthy sponge, it oozes poisons. The body's oil refinery is itself polluted. The crazed enzymes have taken over the asylum." The key point here is that this is not "just" a metaphor. The vehicle (the refinery) does not dissolve into the tenor (the liver) the moment we decode the trope. The movement from liver to refinery is important because it signals a shift in the way Lily understands her own body. As she nears death, her body becomes a prison: "I've been buried alive in the flesh-eating box of my own body." Self describes her comatose state in stunning detail, revealing again the dominant theme of the body's strangeness.