Sunday

The first thing I noticed as I was signing in at The Home was how few people had visited since I last signed out. You would’ve thought that more people would take advantage of the Sunday in the middle of a Bank Holiday weekend to visit a loved one in a nursing home. That they hadn’t upset me slightly.

The second thing I noticed was that there was a resident standing in the reception area and that she was in conversation with one of the senior nursing team. I’d seen this lady before and didn’t think she was a flight risk but still let myself in the security door and closed it quickly behind me.

“Oh!” she said, “It’s you! I thought you were the man from the mountain.”

The nurse looked at me. I looked at him. We both managed to hide that we had no idea what she was talking about.

“No dear. That’s not me. I’m very sorry to have been such a disappointment.”

“No! You’re not a disappointment. I just didn’t want to say the wrong name and have you say you’re not that young man.”

“Don’t worry about calling me the wrong name. Rest assured that whatever you called me, someone somewhere has at some point has called me something far worse.”

“Anyway, I’m going to carry on and see my Mum. I’m going to leave you to enjoy the rest of what looks like being a lovely afternoon.”

Mum’s door was shut when I got upstairs and I could hear movement in her room. I chatted to Eleanor while I waited for whoever it was to finish whatever they were doing.

“I’m fed up and I want to go home. Will you take me home?”

“I’d love to but I’m not allowed to Eleanor”

“They keep putting stuff in me. I don’t like it and I don’t want it.”

“They have to Eleanor. If the doctor says you need meds then they have to give them to you.” I said in the hope that what she was talking about was her meds.

Reggie came to my rescue at that point as he emerged from Mum’s room having just completed Mum’s post-lunch pad change.

“Hey! Nick! You’re just in time! Your Grandmother is back again!”

“Really!? Again!? She’s been here a lot recently.”

“Your Mum’s on good form today. She asked me earlier if I could phone my friend and get him to come and talk to her today. I told her there was no need to call him as he was coming in anyway. I was right ‘cos here you are.”

“Did she? Bless her!”

“Oh, and she seems to have run out of clothes. Actually, I don’t think anything she’s wearing is really hers.”

We looked in her wardrobe. I didn’t recognise anything.

“OK. Looks like a cock-up in the laundry. Don’t worry. I’ll sort it.”

“Hello Mum! It’s Nick! Reggie says your mum’s here again. She’s been to see you a lot recently hasn’t she”

“Yeah, well she’s the only one who has!”

“I come to see you every day though Mum. Whether you like it or not.”

“Yeah”

I decided to ignore what I thought was an unsaid “But you don’t count” at the end of that reply on the grounds that I was probably being over-sensitive.

Mum continued to be chatty but I could make out very little of what she was saying. It all seemed a lot more surreal than would be ‘normal’ for Day Two of her Sleepy/Active cycle. She seemed to be a lot more sensitive to people passing in the corridor, noises from the lounge and activity she could see out of the window in the other wing of The Home than I expected.

What I had expected was for Mum to have been lucid enough to be aware of her condition and for that to have made her miserable but she seemed to have passed through that phase already. Being so calm, comfortable, cooperative and talkative placed her at least a day ahead of schedule as did the number of Other People in the room with us.

Other oddities included referring to her dad as Uncle Arch. She’d talked about him a lot in the past few days but never called him that.

Mum’s Sleepy/Active cycle had changed since moving to The Home. She’d spent a year in a reliable seven day cycle with two days asleep followed by five days where the level of physical animation and the intensity of her hallucinations increased to the point where on the final day she would be physically trying to get out of bed.

Since transferring to The Home, the cycle had been compressed into six days and the portion where she would be asleep and unresponsive had got a little longer. The different characteristics of each day in her old seven-day cycle which had been so reliable were now all jumbled up and appeared out of sequence or merged together.

I left trying to convince myself that this accelerated passage through her cycle from Hypoactive to Hyperactive Delirium wasn’t anything to worry about.

As I walked down the corridor towards the lift I saw a carer sorting through the clothing in another resident’s room and saw her picking out a number of items that I recognised as being Mum’s.

Good old Reggie.

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