Monday

The Dog’s first walk was deliberately shortened today. She’d run out into the back garden some time yesterday afternoon and had stepped on something sharp – probably a stray rose clipping. She limped all evening and felt very sorry for herself. If there’s anything positive to take from the incident it was that she permitted, no, encouraged me to look at it. She’d always been very reluctant for me to inspect an injury before.

So while she seemed to be walking perfectly normally this morning, we didn’t want to take a chance on her going lame miles from home. As it turned out, she was fine.

A short walk suited Lesley. With her dad in steep decline she was keen to get to him and spend as much time time as possible with him. And rightly so.

A short walk also suited Lesley because she’d had a mystery text message from Dad’s new GP reminding her about a a telephone consultation. The mystery was that she hadn’t made the appointment.

As the window for the call came and went Lesley got anxious. She knew that the doctor would cut the conversation if it came in while she was driving and she wanted to get off to Dad. She phoned the surgery. The receptionist wasn’t able to see what the call was about but she could see that there had been some exchanges with the nurses at the home where Dad was.

She didn’t know it at the time but Lesley was going to find that that was a portent for the shit-show that the day would turn out to be.

But having had such a good day yesterday, Lesley set off in the expectation that the crisis over the weekend was a thing of the past and that Dad was back on an even keel.

The first update from her told me that he very much wasn’t on an even keel. At all. Not only was he in agony but his Alzheimer’s was as bad as ever.

In spite of being on the maximum permitted dose, the morphine wasn’t keeping his pain under control. He was in agony. The nurse explained that they’d tried him with paracetamol tablets but he wasn’t able to swallow them. We knew that. He hasn’t been able to swallow tablets that big for months. It’s why he was prescribed capsules. It’s why the staff had been told multiple times that he had to be given capsules. They’d tried to give him paracetamol in liquid form. But he doesn’t like the taste and had refused it. We’ve been spoiled by the staff at The Home where Mum had been. They were uncanny. You could tell one of them something once and they would all know in an instant. And they’d remember. But where Dad was now you could tell them until you were blue in the face and they’d still all be completely unaware.

Absolute Shit-Show.

The shit-show continued when Dad said he needed to go to the toilet. Lesley pressed the call button to summon assistance. None came. She pressed the button again and then noticed that the cable wasn’t plugged into the socket in the wall.

The shit-show escalated when help eventually came. Dad is now too weak and in too much pain to be able to walk across the room to his bathroom so staff bring a commode to him. He won’t “release” as they put it when he’s on the commode. After another unsuccessful attempt with the commode the carer explained that he wouldn’t be able to help for a while because he had 16 lunches to serve. He was on his own. There was nobody else.

We’d known that they ran a very ‘lean’ operation there before Dad was transferred. Lesley, her dad and her sister had seen it for themselves when they visited. It was just one of the reasons why the home the home wasn’t even close to making it onto the shortlist. Whether it was an extremely rose-tinted view of Dad’s condition and needs, a blank refusal to see the red flags that were all to obvious or simply a bloody-minded refusal to take Lesley’s objections into account, her sister insisted that it was the right thing to do.

Dad was then stuck in a loop.

“I just want to go in there.” he’d say, gesturing towards the bathroom.

“You can’t. You’re not strong enough to walk there. I’m not strong enough to help you.”

“Call Nobby.”

“He’s busy.”

And then, a few seconds later…

“I just want to go in there…”

Rinse and repeat.

For half an hour.

Lesley even tried the trick I’d used on Mum. Go out into the corridor, count to 10, go back in and say help was on its way. That didn’t work either.

Lesley did get a break when Dad’s neighbours came to see him and returned when the manager from his day centre came with a colleague. They’re both experienced carers. They were appalled at what they saw going on.

“Why hasn’t he got bed rails!?”

“They don’t have them. None in the building at all. They claim it’s against the law.”

“But that’s bollocks!”

They watched as Dad refused his painkillers again and struggled to work out how to drink from a cup with two handles.

When she got home, Lesley called her sister with an update on the whole sorry saga.

The response was hardly credible.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you…”

At which point my expletive laden reaction at the other end of the room was simultaneously a little too loud and not nearly loud enough.

“… but I’m finding it hard to understand.”

But she doesn’t want to understand what a shit-show that home is. Never did.

The staff are all very nice and very caring but there just aren’t enough of them. The fancy gadgetry that ought to help compensate for the lack of numbers either doesn’t work or isn’t used properly. It all looked like the facilities were just there just to induce gullible and guilty family members into feeling comfortable about putting their loved-one there. Like a fancy car with a tiny engine it was “All Show and No Go”.

It certainly fooled Lesley’s sister and she made sure everyone’s life was a misery until she got her way.

I didn’t hear much of what came next. I had to leave the room before she knew I could hear any more gaslighting. When I returned I heard

“Still, it’s nice that he’s getting so many visitors.”

“No. It isn’t. It was far too many in one day. He’s exhausted.”

“Oh.”

Great comeback from Lesley there. That’s how you deal with a toxic narcissist. Instant, succinct rebuttal. The fewer words you use, the less they have to work with against you. Nice.

While Lesley had been out she had another call from another doctor. It confused her momentarily as she gets so many calls from so many doctors about her dad.

“Oh! You’re my doctor!”

Lesley had made an appointment for a telephone consultation as she was running out of sleeping pills. The GP suggested something different. Lesley showed me what she’d been prescribed.

“Ah. These are antidepressants.”

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.