Friday

For the first day this week we didn’t get woken by The Dog needing to go out in the garden in the early hours of the morning. I got woken by a different dog this morning. Bouncy, waggy and wanting to go out for a walk. At 6am unfortunately. But the first day on antibiotics had made a difference.

The 6am walk wasn’t a walk to relieve her explosive guts. She was on the hunt for some grass to eat. Somehow, she knows which type of grass she needs to eat and remembers where it grows. The ability of this dog to self-medicate always amazes me but then if she wasn’t able to take care of herself she wouldn’t have survived long enough to have got to us.

Her intelligence and self-awareness fascinates me. If she has an upset stomach she has always been able to pinpoint what it was that caused it and knows to avoid it. This time round has been a bit different. Her meals recently have been mixtures of commercial dogfood with home-cooked dogfood topped with poached chicken. Literally dog’s dinners. Because she couldn’t tie her upset stomach to a particular food she has refused everything we’ve given her all week.

The fascination goes deeper. She has the ability to relate feeling bad to something she ate quite reliably but she can’t do the reverse – relate feeling a lot better to the antibiotics we give her. I can guarantee that she will continue to be awkward about taking the rest of the antibiotics course. She has a real aversion to anything she suspects to be ‘medical’.

The promising start to the day didn’t last long. Lesley’s dad’s pharmacy phoned to check whether he was at home and able to receive a delivery of his latest prescription. The webcam showed him to be up and about and ready for his lift to the day centre. Not half an hour later the day centre phoned to say that he had declined the lift because he wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want his lunch delivered either. Phoning him to find out what was wrong didn’t help. He couldn’t hear the question and just kept saying he was fine. Our best guess? He’d got so tired and out of breath walking four yards from his armchair to the front door for the meds delivery that he couldn’t face going out. But that’s only a guess. We over-rode the cancellation of a delivered lunch.

When I got to Mum it took two attempts to get a response but she was awake enough to know that someone was there talking to her but I didn’t think she knew it was me.

She refused a drink and it looked like she’d been doing that for a while. She had two untouched cups of squash and a milkshake with only 50ml or so drunk on her table already when another milkshake turned up. The carer said Mum had refused her lunch too.

So Mum had started to go full on Sleepy some time during the morning and my guess was she’d be totally out of it tomorrow too. All to be expected as that fitted in with the current 6-day cycle as she was out of it last Sunday.

As she was kind of aware that someone was there I told her I would read for a while. We started yet another lap of Father Emmanuel Okoli’s Cotswold parish. After three paragraphs I got a distinct feeling.

“Are you still awake Mum?”

Nothing.

Bibliography

Tales from the Parish: 31 humorous short stories about community, family and village life, set in the English countryside

Kindle Edition

by Stefania Hartley

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