Friday

The day centred around Lesley taking her dad to an appointment at Audiology. I got confirmation that Mum hadn’t yet emerged from her latest Sleepy phase so there was little point visiting her.

Yesterday’s lost hearing aid drama resolved itself. Lesley had warned Dad’s carer last night. Both the hearing aid that Dad thought he had lost and the hearing aid that he had actually lost but hadn’t realised he’d lost were quickly located. Neither was lost. His memory of where he’d put them was what was lost. That along with the memory that the best place to put them when he wasn’t wearing them was in their case.

As he was going to miss a session at the day centre, Lesley took him his favourite lunch – a Marks & Sparks sandwich. His reaction?

“What’s that?”

As neither hearing aid was working, Lesley had to bellow at him to make herself heard all through the process of getting him ready to go, driving him to the hospital and explaining that they weren’t going to be late. But the audiologist spoke to him without raising her voice and he heard her perfectly well. Or at least he seemed to. He got caught out a few times. He’d respond to something as if he’d heard but then in the next breath he’d say something that gave away that he hadn’t at all. In the end it turned out that his hearing aids were fine apart from a little wax build-up. His ears were blocked with wax. That was the problem.

“He’s always been unwilling or unable to keep his ears clean. He couldn’t do it before his dementia got this bad. You’ve got no chance now.” I said, unhelpfully.

“It’s worse than that! He can’t remember how the things work. He told the audiologist that he presses the button on the top to switch them on and off. She looked at me and said that that button’s been disabled. It doesn’t do anything. Yet he swears he can’t hear anything until he presses it.”

Bloody hell.

Then I got told about what happened when Lesley first got to his house. She took some shopping into the kitchen to put it in his fridge. He followed her in.

“What’s that!!?” he said, pointing to a carton in his fridge.

“It’s Clover. We get you that instead of butter. This house is so hot it makes the butter go off.”

“Well I don’t want it! It’s broken my toaster!!”

“It’s done what!?”

“My sandwich toaster. That stuff’s broken it.”

“What!? How?… Show me…”

Lesley recognised the sandwich toaster straight away. We’d got it as a wedding present. After a couple of decades of sterling service with us it had given up the ghost and we were going to throw it out. The thing is nearly forty years old now. But this was when he was in the habit of telling us not to bother making a trip to the dump has he was going himself and would take whatever it was for us. He used to do it with stuff that we were going to take to a charity shop too. For years I would go to his house and find him wearing something that looked like a shirt or a sweater that I’d thrown out and that was uncannily worn out in the same places as the one I used to have. Keeping my old clothes was one thing but keeping electricals that were broken donkeys years ago and then retrieving them from wherever he’d stashed and blaming a butter substitute for it not working… That’s odd on a whole other level. And he was nasty with it, just like he was with his carer that afternoon earlier in the week.

“The thing that worries me is that I just didn’t believe him when he told the audiologist that he could hear better. I think he was just giving her the answer he thought she wanted to hear.”

I was worn out just listening to Lesley’s tale of being with her dad all day. She spent all evening gradually unpacking the experience. Every so often she’d say “And another thing he did was…”.

One example of a thing he did was to ask

“Why does Nick want me to have a hospital bed downstairs?”

“He doesn’t. He couldn’t give a flying one where you sleep.”

“HE DOES!! I don’t want that.”

It had been the District Nurse who had told him he should have a bed in the living room when he got less mobile. My involvement had been in a different conversation. He has a recliner armchair which he has pushed up against a wall so it can’t recline. Lesley had suggested rearranging the room and had added…

“We can only do that when Nick is here because he’s the only one strong enough to lift the sofa and put the risers back under the legs.”

Cobbling together fragments of memory into something that sounded plausible to him and also made him the victim was how I came to get the blame for that.

I’d had a quiet day with The Dog. A couple of gentle walks in the freezing cold for my dog who has been limping intermittently all day. She’d jumped off our bed this morning – the same bed that she’d thrown up on yesterday – and had landed awkwardly.

But, Lesley’s dad, he’s a handful now. I’m going to have to watch this video with Lesley again…

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