Wednesday

“Hi Lesley! Just found out I’ve got to go into London for a meeting today. Can you take our little sprout for a walk when you go out today please?”

A nice message from next door to wake up to. It’s good for The Dog to be walked with another dog and The Little Sprout is the only dog she’ll tolerate anywhere near her. Being seen walking nicely with another dog is good for her reputation locally too and helps other dog walkers react more calmly when they meet her. And when they react more calmly, their dogs are less reactive. And when their dogs are calmer, The Dog is calmer too. It’s a virtuous circle and everyone’s a winner.

Just a couple of short walks though. Lesley was waiting for a call back from the GP.

Our local surgery is very good but we’d seen all the ads on the telly about how many everyday complaints are now “Pharmacy First”. So at 9am on the dot, Lesley phoned the pharmacy. The pharmacist asked Lesley how old she was.

“I’m sorry. You’re too old. You’ll need to go to your GP for that.”

Bloody hell.

If you want to see a GP round here you need to be on the phone and in the queue at 8am sharp to be seen that day. But Lesley was in luck. You can request a phone call using an app. A few hours later, Lesley had had the call and was told the meds she needed were ready for collection at the pharmacy. At our age, you don’t even need to pay for the prescription. The NHS is awesome.

In contrast, the day was book-ended by a call from Lesley’s sister. She’d checked in using the webcam and had seen Dad in his recliner with his feet up as directed by the GP. Even though it was entirely predictable that he would struggle to get out of the chair to answer the phone, she phoned him anyway. She saw him struggle out of the chair and fall on the floor.

“Can you tell whoever is with him tomorrow to leave a handset next to his chair so he doesn’t have to get up?” she said.

“There’s no point. He believes the phone only works if it’s on the charging cradle. If you take one off, he just puts it back. He’s done that for years. We’ve told him until we’re blue in the face but he just won’t change and he never will now.”

An experience like that so soon after starting to use his reclining chair properly was bound to put him off. Sure enough, when we checked, he was sitting upright. Lesley phoned him to make sure he was OK. But the conversation couldn’t follow the standard “Are you OK?” script and he didn’t realise it wasn’t. He just gave the standard answers no matter what Lesley said. In the past few days he’s had his hearing aids reset and repaired and he’s had his ears cleaned and he still can’t hear a flipping thing. OK, he’d just had quite a bad fall which would’ve unsettled him but even so…

Bloody hell.

In the middle of all that, I squeezed in a visit to The Home. I noticed something different straight away. I’d just filled in a survey sent out by the manager and there was a section on what they could do to improve things. In that section I wrote…

“The last thing is mostly MY problem because I’m very English and very Woke – I find asking the name of the staff I meet very awkward especially when I’ve seen them a lot already and especially when they are very young and female. I don’t want to be the guy who says “Hello dear, and what’s YOUR name?”. It’s made me shudder just writing it. Both of Mum’s previous homes had a board which showed who was on duty that shift. Could the same thing be done here?“

Lo and behold… There was a board with names on.

“Hello Mum! It’s Nick.”

I got a smile of recognition. It wasn’t much but it was the most she’d managed this week so far.

She seemed more alert and calmer than she had done so far this cycle but then the bar had been set so low that that wasn’t saying much. I wouldn’t say she was happy. she was just not as distinctly miserable as she’d been for the past few days.

She was more talkative than she’d been but the only thing that was clear enough for me to understand was when she was asking for a drink. And she drank a lot. A full cup of squash and a milkshake got drained.

As for where Mum was in her Sleepy/Active cycle, that was difficult to pin down. Monday was Mum’s third stab at Day One Awake and I couldn’t get here yesterday to see how she was. The staff schedule meant that the team had rotated and no-one on this floor had seen her yesterday so I couldn’t ask them how she was.

Mum was still more like Day One than Day Two. By Day Two she should have just started hallucinating and she hadn’t. She’d been stuck in that Unhappy, Uncomfortable, Uncommunicative and Uncooperative state for days now.

Maybe she was getting more cooperative. She didn’t fight against taking her meds today. But everything else said Day One Again. I caught myself thinking “I wish she’d get past this and start hallucinating. At least her Other people cheer her up!”

I heard Reggie’s voice in the corridor and went out to see him. We had a long chat. When I went  back into Mum’s room she said

“What’s all that noise?”

“Me and Reggie laughing.”

Mum said nothing after that. She was just content to doze holding my hand. She didn’t want the telly on or any music. She tolerated me reading to her.

My phone pinged. A message from Lesley.

“Mum? I’ve got to go home to get Lesley to the pharmacy.”

“Alright. You will come back though?”

Bloody hell.

“Yeah. I’ll come back.”

I didn’t tell her that I wouldn’t be back today though.

I did manage a conversation with one of Lesley’s dad’s carers. He’d noticed that the drinks Dad was part way through at breakfast on Monday were still there at breakfast yesterday.

“I don’t think he’s drinking anything after I leave him at 9:30”

“I think you’re right.”

“Doesn’t he get help in the afternoon’s too though?”

“Yes. He does. It’s a local lady he knows from his day centre. He really likes her.”

The suggestion was made that Dad had got to the point where he needed more help than he was getting. A lot more help. Possibly 24/7 live-in help.

He was right. Dad’s not coping at all now. He might be able to fool himself into thinking he’s still independent but he really isn’t but I don’t think he’s fooling anyone else. But he’s adamant about not going into a nursing home and he won’t stand for live-in help either. I just wonder how much worse his dementia has to get before his capacity to make such a decision is questioned. I’m already at that point.

What a day. What. A. Day.

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