Wednesday

Mum had obviously just woken up when I arrived at The Home this afternoon.

That’s two and a half days asleep out of a cycle which looks to have settled into a six day cycle. Two and a half days where her food and drink consumption is minimal at best.

Once the initial rapid assessment had been done – Unhappy, Uncomfortable, Immobile and doing that thing where she tries to talk but can’t/won’t open her mouth – her meal arrived.

“Are you going to feed Iris or do you want me to….?”

“No, that’s OK. I’ll do it.” I said with, as it turned out, misplaced confidence.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen what she gets for tea since transferring here. At the previous home they’d worked out that they would be more successful if they offered her two Weetabix mashed up in cream and sugar. Rich stodge that appealed to her sweet tooth.

Mum had already said that she couldn’t see me. It wasn’t anything serious. Just a couple of days’ accumulated eye gunk from having been asleep for more than 48 hours. Even though her eyes were all gummed up I didn’t risk letting her see what turned up. I’m guessing it was a ham and vegetable risotto. It was probably a perfect nutritionally balanced meal and it smelled OK but it didn’t exactly look appetising. She spat out what little I gave her. Judging by the comments I could hear in the lounge opposite, she wasn’t the only one who passed on it.

Dessert was a peach & passionfruit yoghurt. You’d think that that would’ve been a safe option but the night nurse at the previous home had been putting Mum’s meds in a fruit yoghurt to stop her spitting the tablets out and now she won’t eat yoghurt at all.

To her credit, Mum did eat four teaspoons-full before saying

“Don’t want no more”

Mum did drink all of her fortified milkshake though.

“Are you hungry Mum?”

“No”

Eleanor was in the lounge and was in a seat where she could see directly into Mum’s room. Right from the moment I arrived she had been shouting

“HELP ME!! HELP ME GET OUT OF HERE!!”

Mum was going back to sleep so I went to sit in the lounge. The extreme heat seemed to have made everyone agitated. Eleanor was miserable, Annie wanted to take her clothes off and Audrey was pretending not to have seen me because I was talking to Eleanor.

Eleanor’s frustration with Annie who was wandering around on the point of bursting into tears got too much for her and she left briefly. I went to talk to Audrey.

Audrey told me a lengthy tale about changing two of her factories. I think. She’s still having to make words up when the vocabulary eludes her. I’ve got no idea what she did in real life but this didn’t sound like it was completely made up. I like to humour her by appealing to the intellect that’s still in there somewhere.

“That all makes perfect sense to me Audrey. It is clearly the best approach. If you’re going to have to reconfigure manufacturing plants then, if possible, you’d want to make changes to one or two, do an assessment and then take lessons learned from them before reconfiguring the rest. You don’t get caught out by unintended consequences that way. You could regard the first two plants as prototypes.”

She loved that. She then said that I ought to meet her mother and father. They’d been there this morning apparently. I was thanked for everything I’d done to help.

Eleanor, who had returned by this stage, sat on the other side of the lounge looking daggers at me because I was talking to Audrey. I took my leave of them both.

“Can you see me now Mum?”

“Yeah”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“No”

Something else to eat, a story, the TV, the ‘radio’… All got the same flat refusal.

“I love you” she said.

I just sat and held her hand until she dozed off again.

As I went down in the lift I could hear voices outside the doors on the ground floor before they opened. I found two carers trying to persuade a resident to return to the lounge. The resident had her back to the doors as they opened. When she turned and saw me she jumped out of skin. I’m twice her size. Once she’d got over the shock her reaction was…. Picture the two old ladies played by Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke in the “Ooh, Young Man!” sketches.

Fortunately, the carers team leader arrived to lead the resident away. I’m not sure what the resident said but the reply was was

“No! He does NOT want to see your boobs!”

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