Friday

Reggie spotted me coming in the front door at The Home from the other end of the main corridor.

“She’s been active today!” he shouted.

“Oh God, has she!?”

“Yeah. Very active!”

Mum’s hallucinations took on a new form today. Not Other People. Pigeons. “Tiny little ones.” And lots of them. To start with anyway.

Other People did make an appearance after a while. Uncle Tony was the only one she recognised. For the first time in a few days her mum and dad weren’t in the room with us.

“Do you want a drink Mum? There’s some squash here..”

“Wouldn’t mind a cup of tea”

“Oh! OK.”

Her tea was delivered a few minutes later.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the tea you just asked for.”

“Don’t want it.”

I had a complete and utter timing fail today and got entrusted with giving Mum both her afternoon meds and her tea. I also had a complete and utter Getting Mum To Cooperate With Anything fail. I had to get Reggie back to give her her meds.

A full meal had delivered for me along with Mum’s. Everybody will tell you that residents will eat more if they aren’t eating alone. The main course looked and smelled alright. Fusilli pasta in a cheese and tomato sauce with chunks of chicken and bacon.

“This is alright Mum. What do you think?”

“Yeah. It’s nice.”

Four pieces of fusilli later…

“Here you go Mum”

“Nope. NO! You eat it.”

“But they’ll tell me off if I eat yours. I’ve got mine here.”

“Give it to Tony then.”

She tried to take the spoon off me to pass it on.

She had two quarters of cheese salad sandwich on her plate. She managed a third of one of them.

We turned to the yoghurt. She managed four teaspoons before starting to resist. I persisted.

“NO! No John. Stop it!

So that’s who she thought I was. A rare mention of my dad’s name.

Reggie said that she’d been very chatty on his morning meds round. Quite a few names he hadn’t heard her mention before. Helen was a new one and he hadn’t heard her talk about Andrew before either.

She had a lot of amusing anecdotes about a variety of people but she was consistently indistinct when it came to saying their names and the key part of what it was that they’d done. All characteristic of Peak Active Mum.

She asked me if I could take The Others with us when I took her home.

“How many people are we talking about Mum?”

She went round the room and counted them.

“22!”

“I need to go and take the dog out for a wee first then.”

“And then you’ll come back for us?”

“I’ll be back later at some point”

“I’ll get ready then”

“OK”

And then, as I was leaving the room…

“And don’t be long!”

Bloody hell.

I think she was pretty close to running out of steam towards the end and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was asleep before I made it out the front door.

My reminder to take a blood pressure reading pinged on my phone as I was driving home.

“This’ll be interesting” I thought

It was the worst of the week so far.

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