Friday

We tried to have a quiet day after the rigours endured during the extended trip to hospital with Lesley’s dad yesterday. I think we managed that in spite of a trip for Lesley to the GP first thing and the attempts to get to the bottom of Mum’s appointment for a heart scan back at The Hospital in London.

The Cardiology team at The Hospital were very helpful and told me who had requested the referral for Mum and when. That allowed me to go through my notes to work out what it was for.

Mum had the last of her serious strokes on the afternoon of 31st May 2023. I remembered that. I was with her when it happened. Dr B made the referral for the scan that night and it got onto the system in the early hours of the 1st of June.

Eldest Sister saw Mum later that day and was told that the purpose of the scan was to test the hypothesis that the strokes had been caused by clots forming in Mum’s dicky heart.

That’s when The Hospital’s systems went slightly haywire. Mum got transferred to the stroke rehab ward a couple of days later. Being a weekend, the handover wasn’t great and there was also the problem that the scan images didn’t get attached to Mum’s notes properly. It wasn’t until I visited on the 6th that I was told that the scans had been done, that the images had been reviewed again and that no clots had been found.

All I needed to do was to get through to Dr B and/or that first ward to see if they were happy that the scan they had asked for was the one that Mum had had and I could let that appointment go. 

I did find it a bit disconcerting that a referral for a scan on a stroke victim had taken just shy of a year to work its way through the system. But then the Tories have been working hard to break the NHS for 14 years now. I’m amazed that anything still works at all to be honest.

I left visiting Mum until late afternoon in order to avoid the extra traffic when the schools turned out and also, mainly, to avoid tea-time at The Home.

When I got there it looked like I’d just missed Mum’s Peak Active, “Here, take this. We’re leaving!” phase and had arrived in time to see her going into a Sleepy phase. She did respond to me, just about, when I first spoke to her. She lifted her head when I rearranged her pillows and blankets and visibly relaxed immediately. Within minutes she was completely unresponsive.

It looked like she’d been on the way out all afternoon judging by the array of drinks on her table. The cup of squash had had 50ml consumed and the smoothie looked untouched.

Then the snoring started.

I reckoned that was her set for the weekend. A bit tough on the visitors coming down on Sunday unfortunately. Mum’s last Sleepy phase dragged on for four days. Not so long ago it would be over in two days tops.

While I made sure that Mum really was asleep and sent my update out on the family chat I listened to the 101 year-old next door giving her Other People a most fearful bollocking. She was unusually loud today.

“You’re dead and you’re dead and you, you lazy little bugger, you’re dead too! I don’t care! Die and die and die!! Good bye. Good bye. Good! Bye!”

She keeps that up non-stop all day apparently.

Bloody hell

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