Thursday

I think Lesley’s visit to her dad at What We Have To Refer To As The Hospital today could best be described as Mixed.

She met a nice young man, a member of the housekeeping team, on her way in. She’s just like me. Nobody gets ignored, senior or not, and everybody is treated with the same respect.

“Oh, so you’re Lesley. He’s been shouting for you all day!”

I know how that feels.

The next stop was the nurses’ office.

“Oh, hello! We were going to call you. He got up in the night. We found him on the floor.”

“What time was that? Was it 4am by any chance?”

They checked their notes.

“3am.”

“Yeah, that’s normal for him. Something disturbs his sleep and he gets up. The worst I’ve known is 10 times in one night.”

Our best guess is that he slips back into a routine that developed when his prostate problems were at their worst. He wakes in the night and goes to the toilet on autopilot. But he’s drinking so little it can’t be the need to pee that’s waking him. The psychiatrist ruled out auditory hallucinations just after Christmas after he’d complained about hearing his doorbell ring or glass breaking in the early hours. Whatever it was that was waking him, it was starting again.

Having said that, the disturbance could’ve been waking him even when he hadn’t got up. The difference last night was that it could have been the first night since he’d had pneumonia that he’d actually had the strength to get out of bed.

Lesley said that she sensed a distinct change in the attitude of the nurses while she was talking to them. That the atmosphere seemed to be thawing a bit after the assessment meeting on Tuesday had turned into such a debacle. She felt listened to at last. Part of that could’ve been down to them sharing a common source of aggravation. They were as irritated as Lesley was that the palliative care nurse was overruling them and the GP.

“We’ll speak to the GP again.”

Lesley’s description of how Dad was when she got to him sounded an awful lot like one I regularly used for my Mum. Uncomfortable and Unhappy.

His conversation was strange but at least he was pleasant to the staff. That was a refreshing change from how he’d been at The Home.

Another change from the past few days was his willingness to get out of bed. It did need two members of staff and a “huge contraption” to help him stand up and move him from bed to chair but at least he got up for a while.

But the change that caught Lesley’s attention most was the way he was dressed. For months if not years before going in to The Home he would have the central heating thermostat set to Furnace and would sit wearing a vest, a shirt, a fleece jacket and sometimes even a blanket over his legs. He’d wear pretty much the same while at The Home and they’d even brought an extra electric heater into his room.

But now, only 10 days after leaving The Home, Lesley found him sitting in bed wearing just a t-shirt and he’d kicked his duvet off because he was hot.

I didn’t say anything but my Mum was like that in her final couple of weeks. She kept complaining of being too hot when I thought she felt cool and clammy. It was only after she died that I heard a hospice nurse talking about how the loss of an ability to sense body temperature was one of The Signs that she’d look for when judging how long someone had left.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. The image is not of the home itself. I used AI to generate an image of a typical modern nursing home. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved. Which, for the new home, is probably just as well.