Saturday

“Good evening Audrey! I do apologise for being so terribly late.”

“Any time!” she replied cheerily.

I carried on through the lounge to Mum’s room. 

Mum was sort of awake, sort of fed up, sort of uncomfortable and totally unintelligible. It was stomach ache again. The uncles invoked today were Tony and Eric. They were pretty much the only words I understood though. Well, apart from when Glenys came in to give Mum her evening meds.

Glenda, as always, said

“Evening Iris! I’ve got your meds and your eyedrops! How are you? Are you alright?”.

Mum said “NO!”

Mum was moving up the Vocalisation and Awkwardness scales but was only just starting to move the needle on the Activity dial. That should be well under way tomorrow.

I told her that Brother his wife would be visiting tomorrow and that my being able to visit will depend on what happens with Lesley’s dad – the reason for me being late today.

Lesley got to his place extra early to start laying out the buffet etc for his birthday party and found the newspaper still in the letterbox, curtains drawn and lights all off. She went upstairs and found him still in bed. She said at first she thought he’d died. But he stirred and started talking gibberish.

It turns out he’d got back from the day centre at about 2:30 yesterday afternoon, didn’t feel great so went upstairs for 40 winks. When he woke up it was dark so he just pulled the covers over himself and went back to sleep. So when Lesley got there he’d had something like 20 hours in a house like a furnace without a drink and he doesn’t drink enough anyway even under normal circumstances. He was totally dehydrated.

He refused a drink from Lesley but the manager of the day centre, who lives a couple of doors down the road, reminded him that he’s not allowed to say NO to her and made him drink. He recovered but not enough to join his own party in his own house. His guests attended him two at a time in his bedroom. The whole thing sounded quite Dickensian.

I did point out that this thing where even a slight illness on top of persistent dehydration can move someone’s capacity below the level they need to be at to take care of themselves is familiar. It’s a very slippery and precipitously steep slope and you can go from apparently capable to totally helpless in a matter of a few weeks. As we all know.

There’s an added difficulty in that in spite of having been told not to fiddle with the switches on his stair-lift now that it was working again, he’d done some terminal fiddling and no-one can get it to work. The stair-lift is ancient. It was fitted for Lesley’s mum and she used it for ages before she died 11 years ago. The machine is so old there is only one engineer with the experience and spares in the south of England now. He’s quite busy but was able to find a gap in his schedule – 9:30am on Sunday morning.

Author’s Note

My Mum is in a nursing home in a small village in the Thames Valley. The photo is not of the home. I used an AI image generator to give the reader some idea of the home she’s in.

All, some or maybe even none (you’ll never know!) of the names have been changed to protect privacy and hide real identities. If you think you recognise someone then let me know and I’ll edit the post or remove it entirely