Tuesday

With Mum having gone into a Sleepy phase in front of my eyes yesterday afternoon I felt safe in the assumption that she was going to be unresponsive all day today. Lesley had to visit her dad so that left me home alone with The Dog.

As usual, Lesley left the house in a highly stressed state. That, in turn, made The Dog very anxious. When The Dog and I left for our walk she decided that she needed to find Lesley and rescue her. There’s no point arguing with her and making her more stressed. I just let her do the walk she wanted. We checked the station and the supermarket and only then could we head off for a long, strenuous and muddy walk.

I got a full account of Lesley’s visit when she got home. The volunteer driver who’d taken Dad to the day centre yesterday had reported that he was extremely weak and wobbly. Noticeably more so than is usual for him now.

More stressful was a call from the Pleural team at The Hospital. It was just a regular catch-up call to get a report on how Dad’s doing but it turned out to be quite troubling. They’d been looking at his records and they couldn’t see any recent blood tests or a recent face-to-face meds review. Another trip to the GP was no real biggie. There have been plenty of them already and there’ll be plenty more I’m sure. The slight problem was that he’s going to need to be able to hear what he’s being asked and his hearing aids already need seeing to again. He can’t get an appointment to see the audiologist for three weeks now that the weekly drop-in clinic at his local community hospital has closed.

Then came the bomb-shell.

“We’re thinking it’s probably time to admit him to the hospice for End of Life care. What do you think?”

 There are lots of issues with that. Our understanding is that Dad is entitled to six weeks funded care in his own home and another six weeks funded care in a hospice. If he survives past that then he becomes liable for funding the hospice care himself at a time when the care is most expensive. What seems to have happened here is that the medical professional has put the decision regarding when Dad has twelve weeks left squarely on the family. That doesn’t seem right. Especially without having seen him themselves. Not that the medical professionals have much idea how long he’ll survive either. The specialists who saw him in the spring gave him a few months and he’s way beyond their expectations.

My best guess, and I know that’s as worthless as anyone else’s prognosis, is that it’ll all be taken out of Lesley’s hands. It looks like his dementia has overtaken the mesothelioma. We gave him a pot of dog treats a while ago so that he could take some for the therapy dogs that visited his day centre. He used to enjoy doing that. He no longer knows what they are. A few weeks ago he was able to actively participate in discussions about his support by carers in the home. He now can’t even understand the questions. He’s increasingly vulnerable to a fall. He isn’t eating properly, doesn’t drink enough and because he can’t remember to manage his pain his sleep is badly disturbed every night. If he has a fall on his way to bed or falls during the night on his way to the bathroom he won’t be found for hours as the morning carer won’t get there until 7:30am.

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