Sunday

Eldest Sister and her youngest stepped up to do the visit today leaving us with dog walking and cooking to deal with.

Over lunch they described what sounded like a difficult visit. I don’t think they’d experienced Peak Active Mum before. I don’t think they’d had a visit where they couldn’t be sure that Mum had recognised them before. I don’t think they’d been with Mum when she would rather speak to her Other People than them before. It made me realise how blasé I’d got about seeing Mum when she’s in a “Get Me Out Of Bed, I’m Going Home” and “All These Other People Are More Entertaining Than You Are” state.

“At least she seemed content and happy” was the best that they could say about their time with her.

Mum had been hyperactive and was trying to get out of bed. All she can manage now is to try and throw her legs over the bed rail. At one point Eldest Sister nearly got kicked in the face while trying to restrain Mum and remake her bed. They both noticed how incredibly thin Mum had got just recently.

Normally when Eldest Sister visits with her family and Mum has been unwilling or unable to join the conversation then Mum would be content to lie quietly and listen to the chatter going on around her. Not this time. Whenever they started talking to her, Mum would turn away from them and talk to the Other People she could see on the opposite side of the bed, floating above her or in bed with her.

Not only that, they couldn’t make out a thing Mum said. Some names were distinguishable and familiar. Uncle Tony’s name came up often as did John’s. We’ve got no idea who Susan or Celia are/were. There were a lot of Other People there today.

Mum behaves like this immediately before crashing into a period of hypoactive delirium. She’ll be very sleepy and unresponsive tomorrow. I think that’s concerning.

Mum could be relied on to have a full week between bouts of hypoactive delirium and she’d been like that for about a year. When she transferred to this home the length of her Sleepy/Active cycle dropped to six days. In the past couple of weeks it had felt like the cycle was changing again. Her last Sleepy & Unresponsive day was only on Wednesday. That seems dramatically quick this time around. I don’t think that change and her recent dramatic weight loss is a coincidence.

At the moment my gut feeling is to trust my instinct that Mum won’t know whether I’m there or not tomorrow and that there won’t be any point in visiting her. It’s been well over a year since I’ve gone two consecutive days without visiting Mum and, to be honest, the prospect of doing that now seems distinctly weird.

I’ll see how I feel in the morning about whether I need to go in and speak to the nursing team to see if they’re worried about this decline.

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