Monday

Monday

Lesley had a much more settled day today and was buoyed by the feeling that more people are supporting her and understanding the difficult position she’d been put in.

The conversation with her dad’s Social Worker sounded very positive. She had reacted quickly and effectively to something Dad’s palliative care nurses had done. Dad is being looked after by a team of two palliative care nurses. One is proactive, caring, knowledgeable and positive. The other one is a Teflon-shouldered box-ticker who contradicts everything her colleague says. Dad is officially at The Home on a respite stay and hasn’t changed his address permanently. But Box Ticker announced one day last week that as Dad was no longer in their area they were discharging him. Not transferring him to the local team, just flat out discharging him. It was up to the nursing staff at whatever home he was in to contact their local team and get him referred. On hearing this, Dad’s Social Worker had contacted The Manager at The Home and Barbara had telephoned Lesley to let her know that she’d done the referral. Amazing.

I then heard the Social Worker ask about the reason for Dad moving to a new home. She was clearly interested to know if there was a problem with The Home.

“No, I have no issue with anything The Home has or hasn’t done. They’ve been great. Professional and caring despite how difficult he’s been. And Dad has even shown signs of settling down. He’s still confused and anxious but he’s been building relationships with more and more staff. The problem is…. The problem has been… The problem is my sister.”

The Social Worker listened carefully and, so far as I could tell, without appearing to judge as Lesley described at length and in detail her sister’s efforts to unsettle Dad and undermine her.

“I don’t know whether it’s just snobbery because she doesn’t think The Home is fancy enough or whether her obsession with making sure that his stay at The Home ended up failing was using him as a weapon against me because of her resentment that I had all the power. I have LPA and she doesn’t. She’s in his ear at every opportunity telling him he has to move and he’ll get no peace until she gets her way. I know it’s wrong to move him now and nobody I’ve spoken to thinks it’s a good idea either but it seems like the lesser of two evils. I have no choice.”

Lesley’s got this routine down pat now. She’s told everyone. The rest of the family and anyone else who really knows her sister are shocked but not surprised. Everyone else is just appalled.

The Social Worker closed by saying that she wanted to do a Continuing Health Care assessment for Dad next week. I still have a copy of the form that I had to fill in for Mum and suggested that we run through it so that Lesley had some idea of the questions she’d be asked and what she could say to make sure Dad scored as highly as possible.

Then there was a call to the contact at what was to be Dad’s new home. The room that they had earmarked for Dad had been occupied on Friday. Now it wasn’t. There was a tinge of sadness for that family’s loss over the weekend but the overwhelming feeling was one of relief.

By then, it was time for Lesley to head off to The Home. This morning’s call from Barbara while we were out walking The Dog had revealed something about Dad. Lesley had been warned to report anything she saw as odd. Dad’s ‘tell’ that something isn’t quite right is a kind of micro-hallucination. He thinks he’s holding something in his fingers and then, when it’s no longer there, starts looking on the floor for it. Lesley had seen it yesterday and reported it as a suspected UTI. Yet again, for the umpteenth time, he tested negative. But the doctor was called and he found what he thought was a chest infection.

Dad was sound asleep when Lesley got there and she found it hard to wake him up. Apart from being far more confused than usual – very repetitive, not knowing where he was – it sounded like he was reasonably cheerful. He hadn’t appreciated “all the doctors poking about” and giving him lots of pills that he’d struggled to swallow though. And there was an additional worry – he’d refused his breakfast and his lunch.