Saturday

Lesley’s dad was the main focus today. For all of us.

I volunteered to drive us over to him. Lesley isn’t sleeping well and I didn’t think she was fit to drive even if the roads were OK. And they aren’t at the moment round here. The weekend train timetable is too sparse to make that a viable alternative. Having the car gave us more options.

Plus, Mum was highly likely to still be deep in the latest Sleepy phase making me a bit freer than usual.

Having the car available would help as we had to buy Sunday lunch for Eldest Sister and her offspring who were due to visit Mum. That was one thing.

Another thing was that I wanted to try out my new walking boots. Walking The Dog is easier if we’re all together and if I needed to bail on a walk because my feet got sore then I was more likely to get away with it than I would’ve been if I was walking with The Dog on my own.

Going to Dad would also enable us to re-arrange his living room furniture if needed and was a distinct possibility after his fall the other day.

Last, but not least, The Dog has been looking longingly at the car each time we take her out for a walk recently. She clearly wants an adventure so an adventure she will have.

Dad was a fair bit livelier than I’d expected. Not that he got up out of his chair or anything. Being able to stay awake for the time we were there was enough to count as lively. It’s all relative.

Also relative was his relatively high level of confusion today. His dosset box was all over the place. I think he still knows what day of the week it is reliably so perhaps he just can’t see the day label on the box but he seems to take take tablets from whichever compartment he fancies. Or forgets completely.

He still has a daily newspaper delivered. I don’t know what he gets from it now but we see him on the webcam looking at it from time to time. He doesn’t talk about what’s in it now though. Fortunately.

I saw today’s edition on the pile to go out for recycling and he had a three day old edition next to him.

“Have you really finished with today’s paper then?”

“No, I haven’t seen it.”

While Lesley got on with her regular tasks – next week’s meds, post, bills, making sure he’s got cash, writing up next week’s carer schedule and appointments large enough for him to be able to read – I had a look to see what he’d done to his sandwich toaster.

This was the toaster that had become unserviceable because he’d been forced to use Clover instead of butter. Bear with me. It’s a long story…

He has his central heating thermostat set to ‘FURNACE’ so anything edible that isn’t in the fridge goes off in seconds. That includes his butter, it’s often gone rancid in the butter dish. But, if you put his butter in the fridge then he hasn’t got the strength in his hands to spread it on his bread. Hence: Clover.

The arrival of the Clover in his fridge coincided closely enough with the demise of the sandwich toaster for him to believe that the one caused the other. There’s no point in trying to persuade him otherwise. It’s not his dementia that’s the problem here although it has to be said that that isn’t helping. There never has been any point in trying to change his mind as long as I’ve known him. If he has a gift it’s his unshakeable belief in the correctness of his own opinion and no fact or shred of evidence to the contrary will persuade him otherwise. It used to drive me insane but now I find it both fascinating and amusing. I’ll show you a little thought experiment which might explain what we’re dealing with here.

Imagine, if you will, that we have a scenario like one that less high-brow news outlets use to predict the winner of an election or the World Cup. You write the names of the competitors on cards and get an animal to pick one. This is essentially random so over a period of time you’d expect the animal to get the answer right 50% of the time. Lesley’s dad, on the other hand, achieves something different. He never selects the right answer. Ever. But he never gets to select any of the obvious but wrong answers available either. He seems to end up with his own unique and often comical alternative answer. It’s either creative genius or something else. And as I’ve been saying for decades now… “Lesley’s dad? He’s really something else.”

But back to the sandwich toaster… I was as certain as I could be that it was the one that I thought had been disposed of a couple of decades ago. It had been a wedding present and we used it ourselves for years before it became unreliable. He volunteered to take it to the council tip but had kept it. He did that a lot.

Judging by the direction of flow of the gunk on the back of it, he’d been using it upside down too. The hot plates can be removed for cleaning and the mechanism for holding one of them in place was jammed so it just fell out. The heating elements were loose. And the power cord was fraying and I could see the wires inside through the broken insulation. I wasn’t surprised. It’s nearly 40 years old.

“OK, I’ve looked at your sandwich toaster. This bit is broken, so is this bit and the power cable is dangerous. I’m taking it to the dump for you and we’ll get a new one.”

“But.. But… There’s a repair café down in the village. They can fix all sorts there…”

“Nope. It’s completely knackered beyond hope. I’m taking it away.”

I know the Number One Rule when dealing with people with dementia is not to challenge their beliefs and actions because any argument is unwinnable. But you can break that rule when they’re putting themselves in danger and he was in danger of burning the house down.

I can understand his resistance to change. That’s also something that predates his dementia but has been made worse by it. But a line has to be drawn somewhere and that was where I drew it.

On our return from The Dog’s walk we returned to find another example of his confusion. He was just getting used to using the recliner feature of his armchair after years of being told to. He’d had a bit of a setback this week when trying to get up out of it while still reclined to answer the phone and had ended up falling on the floor but he decided he was going to have another go while we were out. However, he’d been pressing the wrong button and instead of reclining backward he was seconds away from tipping himself forwards and falling flat on his face.

“Sit there Dad while I get your tea ready.” Lesley said to him.

Half a sandwich and a milkshake.

He was struggling to eat the sandwich and tried to give it to The Dog. She was eager to oblige too.

“We’re going to have to sit here and watch him eat it. He’ll chuck it away if we don’t.”

But Lesley was keen to go.

“He’ll be ages though!”

“I know he will but you have to give him time. Mum’s just the same. And we’ll have to stay until he’s finished the milkshake too. He’s been caught throwing those away as well.”

“Bloody hell.”

I don’t know if it’s the experience of being with Mum and the other residents at The Home so much or the help that the staff there give me but I find him a lot easier to, er, I think the best word is Tolerate, now that his dementia has got so extreme. Having an official excuse for his cantankerousness and cussed, deliberate awkwardness makes it easier to let go of than it used to somehow.

He finished as much as he was going to finish and we eventually got away.

“We’ll have to stop at Lidl.”

“OK. You know what you’re going to get? Roast chicken for tomorrow?”

The Dog and I waited in the car. Lesley got distracted by the middle aisle and got everything on the list except the chicken.

But we didn’t find that out until we got home.

I don’t know how he does it but being with him fries your brain.

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