Tuesday

It was an interesting visit to The Home today. I got a bit of everything from Mum. Mum was awake and staring into space when I walked in her room.

“Hello Mum! It’s Nick. How are you? Alright?”

“No”

“What’s the matter?”

Silence

“Are you just generally fed up?”

“Yeah”

We talked about how nice the weather was, how it was due to be nice for the rest of the week, how good the dog had been on her walk this morning. That sort of thing.

“You haven’t got to go early have you? Are you staying until tea time?”

“Yeah. No rush today Mum.”

One of the junior nurses stopped at Mum’s door.

“Oh! She’s talking now!”

“Yep. We were talking about how nice it is out there today. I was just thinking that it would be nice for Mum to sit in the garden for a while. The gardens here are lovely. What do you think Mum?”

“No”

But Mum did cheer up and became more talkative. At this stage in her Sleepy/Active cycle you’d expect her speech to be relatively clear except for the key part of every sentence which told me exactly who she was talking about and what they had or hadn’t done that had displeased her.

And was precisely what I got.

“{indistinct ramble} and I said ‘Not There! Over there!!'” or

“{long indistinct ramble} and they wanted him to get on here! I don’t want that! I don’t want it!”

“Well Mum, if they’re doing something you don’t like or they’re not doing it the right way then tell them. Or tell me and I’ll tell them. But they’d be upset if they knew that you weren’t happy with something so just tell them.”

Silence.

And then…

“I want to move. Somewhere near you.”

“But you are near me. That’s why you’re here in the countryside. This place has a very posh address and it’s next to a farm. There’s the barn there and if you go in the lounge you can see the fields and the cows and the river is just the other side of some trees.”

“Is it?… When can I move?”

Then she said something else which might have been a request for a story so I just started reading.

While I was reading, Mum was gripped by pain. She wouldn’t tell me whether it was stomach ache or pain from relieving herself. It was clearly agony and she started to cry. It went away as suddenly as it had started.

I started reading again.

Then some random notification pinged on my phone.

“That’s a message from Lesley to tell me that my tea’s ready”

“OK. Don’t be long.”

Bloody hell.

I got to the lift and drew in and blew out a huge sigh.

“Who was that!?” boomed a voice from the nurses’ office.

“It’s only me.” I said as I popped my head round the office door.

The nurse looked mortified.

“I’m so sorry! I thought it was one of the carers. I was about to come out and tell them that if they felt like that they should sit down, have a rest and get a drink!”

“How do you cope with a twelve hour shift? I’m exhausted after an hour. Is that just because I’m family?”

We talked for some time about how our views of Mum are different. How I see her for an hour every day but they see her for a long period each shift but don’t normally do more than four shifts each week and even then they may not be in the same part of The Home. They see clinical differences that I’m not even aware of. She knew that there will be things that I notice and they don’t because she’s my Mum. They see how a good visit can change how Mum looks, how it changes the tension in her face. I told her that because I do an update for the family after every visit I have a long-term record of how she is and I look for long-term trends. I see that the length of Mum’s Sleepy/Active cycle is shortening and that the proportion of each cycle where Mum’s unresponsive is increasing. I, for one, found it quite enlightening.

I apologised for sighing so loudly and made my way back to the lift. 

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