Nursing Home

By Nick Gilmore

Published: 20 Oct, 2024

Sunday

I can’t remember the last time I washed my car. It’s going in for it’s MOT test tomorrow. Call me old-fashioned but I like to think that mechanics look more kindly upon a car that’s getting on a bit if it’s tidy. They did actually comment on how well kept it looked last year. So that’s what I did today.

Lesley dipped in on her dad’s webcam every so often. He was asleep in his armchair with his head slumped forward and his jaw slack on his chest. Eventually, she asked me

“He hasn’t moved for three hours now. If he was… you know… wouldn’t he have fallen over?”

I zoomed in on the image. He didn’t look great.

“Ah, look! His broadband must be iffy again. The camera is only sending the bits of the image that are changing. His chair and the lamp behind him are nice and sharp but his chest is all blurred and low resolution because there’s no bandwidth. So he must be breathing.”

And then…

“Aha! Look! He just moved.”

“OK. I’ll ring him when he wakes up.”

An hour later, she phoned him.

“Dad? Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m running out of toilet paper.”

“The new pack is on the chest on the landing.”

“Sorry??”

“I SAID THE NEW PACK IS ON THE…”

“Sorry??”

“Never mind Dad. I’ll see who’s with you tomorrow morning and let them know where it is.”

“OK!”

I spoke to his two male carers later. They both said how Dad had got noticeably weaker in the past couple of weeks. How his clothes only fit where they touch. How when they give him his breakfast he’s eating less. How they’d noticed how much he leaves of his other meals during the day. How they thought this was as much down to his advancing dementia as it was his mesothelioma. They were concerned.

I met Reggie on my way into The Home. He said that Mum had been much more like she usually is on the first day awake after a Sleepy phase. We’ve discussed Mum’s Sleepy/Active cycle so often now that he calls it Day One too now. She’d seemed unhappy, uncommunicative and uncooperative.

“Yeah, that sounds much more like normal.” I agreed.

He voiced his concern at how thin and frail she was. How sunken her cheeks were.

“And this bit here…”

“That hollow behind her eye sockets?”

“Yeah.”

But when I got to her room she seemed quite bright and talkative.

“Can I have a drink?”

“A what Mum!?”

“A drink. Can I have a drink?”

She never does that. I always have to tell her to have a drink. She said the drink was lovely and told me she was thirsty. She never does that either. She kept asking for a drop more. She finished a whole cup in about twenty minutes. All very odd.

She got more talkative. Not that I could understand very much. And she seemed quite lucid too. She was unexpectedly upbeat considering how lucid she was. Being this lucid would normally mean she would be aware of where she was and how she was and that would normally make her miserable. Not today. Perhaps she just wasn’t as clear about where she was as I’d thought.

That’s quite possible. My hit rate on understanding her was really poor today. I often couldn’t even tell when I’d been asked a question let alone figure out whether my generic, non-committal response to her should be positive, negative, concerned or pleasantly surprised.

She had a bit of a dip in the middle of the visit. She got a bit sad when talking about her aunties. I could make out the names Lou, Sis and Phyll but I couldn’t tell what it was that they had or hadn’t done.

Then…

“I could sit all day and talk to you. I wish you could get in bed with me and we could just sit and talk.”

It’s been months since she’s said anything like that and when she had said it before it had been much later in her Sleepy/Active cycle.

Her cough wasn’t so bad today. She said it had been “nasty” though. She didn’t feel as hot as she did yesterday either.

She asked for “some stories”. That’s not that unusual but staying awake and engaged through an entire chapter was.

There weren’t any Other People with us but I didn’t think they were far away. From time to time she’d get distracted by something that moved across her eyeline that she would squint at before it disappeared.

In spite of her looking better than she did on Friday this still felt like an odd visit. There’s a chance she might get back to something approaching ‘normal’ when this virus passes but the vibe I’m getting is that this has been a big challenge for her. Not immediately terminal but she won’t get back to where she was last week.

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

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