Thursday

Started the day with an elementary tactical error. We started packing a bag with The Dog’s lunch, her long line and our walking boots straight after breakfast. The signs were clear to her – there was going to be An Adventure.

 We tried to get her to go on a short walk so that she could relieve herself and get comfortable before being stuck in the car for a while. But she was adamant. She was getting in the car and wouldn’t go anywhere.

First stop was a stop for a haircut at our hairdresser’s house before going on to see Mum at The Home. But The Dog was still too pumped to risk taking her inside The Home. No matter, we thought, Lesley could take her for a walk across the farmland down to the river. But she wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t leave the car and she wouldn’t leave the building she’d just seen me go in.

Mum had clearly just woken up when I walked in her room. I didn’t need to do my normal greeting and tell her I was there. She recognised me straight away.

“Ooh! Nick!”

And that was the end of the positive news. It went rapidly downhill from there.

“Hello Mum. How are you feeling?”

“Not very well.”

“Oh no! What’s wrong?”

Silence.

“Headache? Stomach ache?”

More silence.

“Should I go and tell someone you aren’t feeling well?”

“No. They’ve got more to do than worry about me.”

Her carer for the day was hovering with her lunch. I offered to feed Mum with, as it turned out, more confidence than was justified.

I started with the fish pie. I began gently with a couple of morsels of potato topping with some of the white sauce. Feeling bolder, I offered her a piece of fish. She spat it out. And then refused the potato too.

Her carer returned to see how we were doing.

“If she doesn’t like it I can go downstairs and get some cottage pie.”

Mum grudgingly ate another couple of miniscule pieces of potato but spat out the first piece of meat I offered.

“Do you want to try some more of this cottage pie or…”

“Drink”, she interrupted

“… should we try some of this fruit salad?”

“DRINK! I SAID I WANT A DRINK!!”

I did get her to eat some tiny pieces of peach and strawberry but a piece of pear was chewier than she liked so she spat it out and refused anything more. She’d hardly eaten anything and was only interested in her fortified milkshake.

I gave up at that point. Mum just sat in sullen, resentful silence. Unhappy, Uncomfortable, Uncooperative and Uncommunicative are standard for her first day awake in a cycle but seeing her this angry and utterly miserable wasn’t usual.

Her nurse arrived with her afternoon meds. Mum refused those too. To start with at least.

“Right Mum. Lesley and The Dog are waiting outside. We’re going to see Lesley’s dad now. Get some sleep and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Silence.

The tasks ahead of us at Lesley’s dad’s were simple enough:

• load his dosset box with his meds for the coming week
• do his laundry
• fix things he’d broken
• find things he’d lost
• clean things he’d made a mess of
• sort through his fridge and throw away the things he’d forgotten about and left to go off
• make his evening meal
• oh, and go through, once more, the dire consequences of not accepting the extra help in his home that we’d arranged from people we knew rather than leaving him at the mercy of the NHS, Social Services and a nursing home

All were achieved with remarkable ease. I do wonder whether he’s just more compliant when I’m there. It does feel like he’s a cantankerous bully when I’m not.

Along the way we found that he’s getting more confused by his meds and that he’d been taking more paracetamol than he’d admitted to. And perhaps more paracetamol than he’d realised.

I asked him about his pain. Where it was and how often it was bad. It was where the Palliative Care team told us it would be and almost every day.

When I’d checked in with the webcam a few days earlier I’d seen him sitting with a blanket over his knees. He must’ve been cold but his thermostat is normally set to ‘Furnace’. When I checked his central heating/hot water programmer I found he’d switched everything off. I reprogrammed everything and taped the cover shut. Obviously, he blamed his cleaner for fiddling with it.

His meal was a freshly baked sausage roll from the village butcher. Just a cherry tomato and some Branston with it so not a huge meal. He managed about half of it.

The day was wrapped up with The Dog’s favourite walk and a game in one of the village’s pristine chalk streams. Well, pristine and crystal clear until The Dog got in it.

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