Wednesday

While I’d been visiting Mum yesterday evening, Lesley had called her dad to make sure he was alright. Due to his deafness and increasing dementia the call has to follow a script, Any deviation from that causes too much confusion and frustration. If he needs to be told something then Lesley has to text a neighbour or the manager at the day centre so they can stand in front of him and tell him.

A standard call is:

“Hello Dad. It’s me.”

“Hello Me.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“That’s all I need to know.”

“OK. Bye.”

“Bye!”

Click.

Even though the calls are very short they’re a god indicator of how he is doing. The fact that he’s able to get up and answer the phone is good enough. Oh, and yes, he does have cordless handsets and no, he never has one with him. Yes, he has one in the living room, one in the dining room and one in his bedroom but he’ll only ever answer the one in the living room no matter where he is in the house. For reasons that we’ll never know, all the handsets have to stay on their charging cradle. He’s thought that for years. What was once a major irritation has become a useful tool. If he can get out of his chair to answer the phone then he must be alright and with the introduction of the webcam Lesley can be sure to only call him when he’s in the living room.

Indicators of him not being quite right are things like him not hanging the phone up properly. That would be down to a lack of strength to press the button properly or not being able to see well enough to press the right button.

It was his poor eyesight that was the cause of the call yesterday evening going wildly off script and a fair degree of angst here overnight. He had an appointment for an eye test this morning and only as an afterthought at the end of the call he said

“Oh, I meant to tell you… The optician called this afternoon.”

“Really!? What did they say?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think.”

“I hope they weren’t calling to cancel because I’m not going to be able to find out before I get to you in the morning.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the appointment is at 10 and I’ll need to get to you at 9 to have time to get you there. That’s when they open.”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind Dad. I’ll see you tomorrow”

When Lesley told me the tale as I walked through the door my first reaction was

“You told them about his dementia and his deafness when you made the appointment. What on earth were they thinking calling him?”

In the event, the appointment went really well. Yesterday’s call had just been a reminder and they’d got his number because he’d been there years ago. They got to the bottom of why his eyesight is so poor. He’d confused his reading glasses and his distance glasses and was always wearing the wrong pair. Between Lesley and the optician, he was convinced to get bifocals this time round.

This begs the question why he didn’t have them already. The answer is that when he had his cataracts done ten years ago the consultant advised him to give up his varifocal glasses temporarily until his eyes settled down. He either didn’t hear the word ‘temporarily’ or didn’t understand it and ever since had flatly refused to return to them leaving him reliant on two pairs of glasses.

Sometimes I wonder just how recent the onset of his dementia really is.

Consequently, with Lesley out all day I got to The Home far later then I’d intended. That’s often the case now.

Mum was hallucinating more strongly than ever and the visit was quite short. I met the senior nurse for the day shift on Mum’s floor and a couple of the carers who were waiting for their lift in the car park on my way out.

“Hello Nick! How was Iris? Was she alert?”

“Alert? Well, she was awake and talking. She didn’t stop talking.”

“Ha! Yes! The talking! She’s been talking all day!”

“Yeah. She was talking to her Other People again. I reckon her hallucinations were more real to her than I was. I’m not convinced she knew who I was and within ten minutes she seemed to forget I was even there. If I did try to say anything she’d just look confused with a ‘Who The Hell Are You?’ face on.”

They all seemed to wince when I said Mum didn’t know who I was. Bless them.

I gave my account to Lesley when I got home.

“You seem to be taking it remarkably well that she didn’t recognise you.” she said.

I’m not sure I am.

But it’s not the first time that’s happened and it won’t be the last. I’ll get used to it. I’m going to have to aren’t I?

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