Thursday

Thursday

The pressure was on today. Brother had asked if and when Mum might be ready, willing and able to do another video call. That meant having to do an assessment of how she was and predict how she was going to be over the next few days.

There was a slight delay to proceedings as Lesley’s dad’s cleaner messaged us to say that his recent run of decent days had come to an end. He’d got himself in a mess again. He didn’t know how it had happened and he couldn’t even tell her when it had happened. She just knew he’d been OK when she was there on Tuesday. She was able to get him cleaned up and get all his clothes in the washing machine but her timetable wouldn’t allow her to stay and do a second load. If his bed was dirty then we’d have to go over and finish the clean-up.

Once we’d got the all clear and had been stood down we walked The Dog. We had returned to uneventful and enjoyable walks so yesterday was just a blip. On the way home we met one of our postmen. Not so long ago, The Dog would’ve reacted really badly to seeing the uniform. Not now. That uniform means Big Treats. He complimented us on how much progress we’d made with her.

Mum was awake this afternoon. Mostly.

It was hard to judge how long she’d been awake. Long enough to have eaten lunch and for the meal to have given her stomach ache. Not long to have caught up with her fluid intake – she was gasping for a drink.

We had the standard First Day Awake characteristics – Uncomfortable and Unhappy. She was still immobile but she was trying to be significantly more communicative than you’d expect for Day One. Not that I could understand much. “Don’t leave me on me own” and “Don’t go home without me” were clear enough but not much else. I think she asked when her sandwiches were coming and she nodded when I asked if she was hungry. That wasn’t what I expected.

How lucid was she? Lucid enough for me to be reasonably certain she knew who I was. Lucid enough to brighten up when I suggested that we could do a video call with Brother in the next day or so. Lucid enough to ask me to read some stories. And lucid enough to enjoy hearing the tale of Our Hound mugging our postman – how she knows he has a pouch with huge dog treats and how he got done for two of them. Oh, and lucid enough to be disturbed by the racket in the corridor outside her room.

I’ve written before about how moods and emotions seemed to be contagious in The Home. Both Annie and Eleanor were having bad afternoons too. The Mood of the Day today was Lost & Lonely. Neither of them knew what to do or where to go. One or other of them would be shouting for her son or just anybody to talk to. Consequently there was a lot of shouting and noisy walking frame pushing going on.

Mum calling for Uncle Tom, Terry and her mum when the stomach ache got bad was fairly standard for Day One. What wasn’t was being sent downstairs to look for a man who’d come to see her about something. I had no idea what that was all about and that sort of hallucination doesn’t normally happen on Day One.

So the bottom line was that this looked like being another non-standard cycle and I had no idea how it was going to run. Mum might be up for a call tomorrow but last week she took an extra day to wake up properly so maybe not. The trip to hospital with Lesley’s dad made tomorrow logistically awkward for me so I reckoned we should go for the video call sometime on Saturday if that suited.