Thursday

Big day for Lesley’s dad today. A difficult day.

He was due to meet people from the Mental Health team after his GP referred him when told about the disruption caused by the noises he hears in the night.

He’s been complaining that people are ringing his doorbell in the early hours for a long time. These incidents have been getting more and more frequent recently and have progressed to him also being woken by the sound of breaking glass. It’s so frequent now that he may go several nights without any sleep.

The initial thought that these were auditory hallucinations was scotched pretty quickly. If he was hallucinating then he’d be hearing them during the day too. But he doesn’t.

The new explanation was that it was just a feature of his combination of advancing dementia and sensory impairment. His obviously doesn’t wear his hearing aids at night so the fact that he can hear anything at all is remarkable. But if he does hear something his mind will go into overdrive to make sense of what little he did hear and build it into something he can make sense of. I’ve wondered for a while whether he has some anxiety about being alone in the house at night. One of Mum’s dementia symptoms was occasional paranoia. It may be for him too. So if he is anxious then a sound in the night that makes most sense to him would be someone interfering with the front of the house or breaking in at the back.

But the construction of a sound that’s very real to him took on a whole new life today and it had a complete back story. The perpetrators were the shelf-stackers who work in the Tesco down the street overnight and he had armed himself with a torch so he could see their faces. When he caught them he would go down there and get them sacked. Well, that explained his current obsession with buying batteries then. It did fail to accommodate the fact that that store doesn’t have people working in it overnight though and he hasn’t been in the store for years so he’d hardly be able to recognise them. None of the houses between the store and his house have been afflicted by these antisocial hooligans either. It would be quite a feat to walk all that distance to get to his house and not be tempted along the way.

Lesley wasn’t fazed by hearing this yarn. She hadn’t heard this particular one before but she’d heard plenty like it. Little shards ‘evidence’ woven into a complex tapestry of criminal malfeasance. And once the notion is in his head he cannot be convinced that it isn’t fact. The stories have become a little wilder as his dementia has worsened but this is something he’s always done. People who don’t know him will tell you how engaging he is but the stories he tells won’t have more than a passing acquaintance with any truth. Even less so now.

The meeting concluded with a discussion about getting Social Services involved. He seemed to be in agreement while the visitors were there. But straight after they left…

“Who did they say I should meet?”

“A Social Worker”

“Oh no, I don’t want that”

“Why not?”

“Because I know what they’ll say”

“And what’s that?”

“That I should be in a home. If they say that then you’ll have to say No.”

The last time I was at his house it had struck be how much worse his dementia was compared to the previous time. All his carers have said how much worse he’d got and today’s carer said he was particularly bad this week.

And his vulnerabilities were on full display today.

He was at the front door receiving his lunch from a day centre volunteer when Lesley parked her car on his drive. Lesley heard the volunteer ask him who had just arrived. She heard him say he didn’t know. She watched him leave the front door open having seen a car he didn’t recognise on his drive and totter through the house with his lunch to the kitchen without his walking frame or a stick.

“Oh!” he said on his return, “I didn’t know you were coming”

“It’s on your planner Dad”

“I can’t read your writing”

“OK, well the doctor will be here in 15 minutes. I’m going to get you a drink because your mouth is so dry you can hardly speak and you’d better have your lunch now too.”

Lesley left him to put the neighbours’ Christmas cards through their doors. She’d only done one when she saw the doctor coming up the street. She let herself back into his house and caught him scraping his lunch into the bin. Well, into and around the bin.

Once Lesley had finished unloading her tale of woe on me I gave my view.

“I think he’s got a lot worse recently, both the boys are experienced professional carers and they think he’s got so bad that they’re frightened for him. They think he’s deteriorating fast. He’s not drinking at all, he’s not eating enough and now he’s leaving his front door open to strangers. I think it’s time now. It’s well past time. And it’s only going to get worse over Christmas. Lots of doctors and nurses have told me that people with dementia can get on pretty well if they’re in their routine but it unravels completely if there’s the slightest change. And you said yourself how you explaining how the carer visits were going to get a bit patchy next week stopped him understanding anything you said.”

“I know I said that I would respect his wish not to go in a home but I can’t take any more of this. The risks he’s taking and the mistakes he’s making now.. He needs constant supervision.”

Surprisingly, her sister agreed when she called for her update and Lesley went through the whole day, blow by blow, again.

That was when I learned I’d only got the highlights during the first unload. There was plenty more that I hadn’t heard first time around.

Meanwhile, I’d been at home on tenterhooks waiting for the call from the Medical Examiner so I could get on with registering Mum’s death. The funeral director had helped us track down a number for them so we could find out what was going on.

“You’re on the list for a call this morning” they said

“On the list for a call this morning my arse!” I said as 6pm came and went.

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