Friday

Mum calm, content and mostly cooperative this afternoon. She was very talkative but nearly  everything she said to me was too indistinct to understand.

The Manager had organised an informal meeting at The Home for family members. It was useful to find out that it wasn’t just Mum’s laundry that was going missing.

More interesting was hearing how much interaction the other families had with residents who weren’t ‘theirs’. I rarely saw other visitors, mainly because Mum’s never in the communal areas of The Home, but I’d never witnessed what they were talking about myself. I won’t feel so self-conscious about speaking to the other residents in the future.

After a very fancy buffet lunch I went back to Mum. She had just got the stage where she is rolling up her bedclothes in preparation for leaving. Her Other People were starting to arrive too. I thought I ought to try and get an update on her sore bottom before things got out of hand.

“Is your bum still sore Mum?”

“Yeah”

Juliette arrived with Mum’s afternoon meds at that point and I asked her what they knew about the soreness after I’d reported it on Wednesday.

“We didn’t find anything.”

And then…

“Iris? Is your bottom sore?”

“No?” she replied, leaving the “What on earth gave you that idea?” part unsaid.

Bloody hell.

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