Wednesday

A complete rollercoaster of a day. And for Lesley, a really torrid day.

Plans had been hastily made once we’d got confirmation that Lesley’s sister had been able to reschedule her flight yesterday evening after Dad had convinced everybody that he probably wasn’t going to last more than 24 hours. Thankfully there was no call overnight so she stood a chance of seeing him before he went.

The plan was for Lesley was to do a quick whizz round Waitrose to get food in for her sister, then I would drop her off at the home before continuing on with The Dog to Dad’s house. The tasks assigned to me there were to get the food in the fridge, make up the spare bed, reprogram the central heating controller to suit an occupied house and give The Dog a walk.

The first of the day’s updates from Lesley arrived. I’m not sure what she expected to find when she got to Dad. I don’t think she knew what to expect herself given how bad he’d looked yesterday. I think it’s fairly safe to say that what she didn’t expect was to be told how pleased the nurses were with him. He’d had a good night’s sleep and and had had a decent breakfast of scrambled eggs. His swallow reflex had improved and he was even able to swallow his meds. He’d felt well enough to ask to get out of bed and managed a short spell in an armchair. He was calm and comfortable but he’d tired quickly and was sleeping again.

That all changed when he woke up. He was agitated and angry. Furious with everything and everybody.

Given Dad’s terror at being in a nursing home, we, and everyone who visited him, maintained the illusion that he was in a private hospital. That became a target of his fury. If it was a hospital, why weren’t they doing anything to make him better? One reason for him not getting any treatment was immediately demonstrated. A nurse arrived to give him an injection. He refused to let them do it and told the nurse to leave him alone.

His fury was then directed at Lesley.

“I’ve been here for weeks and you still haven’t done anything about the pattern on the curtains!”

I told Lesley I thought he was trying to copy somebody famous’s last words.

“Who said “Either those curtains go or I do”? Let me Google it… Ah, it was Oscar Wilde… And it was the wallpaper, not the curtains… And it wasn’t what he said anyway.”

Dad had completely lost the ability to describe what was troubling him in a way that was useful to anyone who could do anything about it many months ago. He’d been that way long before there was any firm indication of how advanced his Alzheimer’s was. Today, his rants varied from the oddly trivial, through completely bizarre to utterly unintelligible. Nothing and no-one was spared.

There was one spell of respite when an injection was successfully administered. He’s going to get a lot of them and he has a line in his thigh to make things easier. But that only calmed him for a few minutes. Pretty soon he was as furious as ever. He was irate about noise. A resident two rooms away was in distress and her shouting annoyed him. The slightest noise that Lesley made annoyed him.

“Do you think I should take his hearing aids out?” Lesley asked me.

“Only if you think you can get him calm enough to put them back in if someone needs to tell him something.”

The fury continued and the hallucinations got worse and worse until Lesley got a message from her sister saying she was on the train from the airport. Lesley told him she was on her way and would be with him soon. He smiled and went to sleep.

Lesley had endured several hours of difficult and disturbing behaviour from her dad when one of his palliative care nurses made a huge mistake. She visited Dad to see how he was doing. Lesley told her the error of her ways.

“I think the way you’ve treated me has been disgusting!”

The reply was not recorded.

“I phoned your office on Friday to tell you he was in steep decline. They said you’d call on Monday. Instead, I’ve been left in limbo…

“I’ve found the regulations on the NHS website. Here, that’s the page header so you can see it’s genuine. Now read paragraph 30…”

<insipid protest>

“READ IT!”

“But, but this is my job!”

“This has been in force since September! Nothing you’ve told me is right. You’ve never read any of this have you?”

In spite of Lesley’s well-reasoned and impassioned argument, the nurse would not be swayed and still refused to make the application for fast track end of life care funding.

“Alright. Who do I appeal to?”

“You can’t appeal.”

“DON’T BE SILLY! EVEN HIGH COURT JUDGES CAN HAVE THEIR DECISIONS APPEALED!!”

“I don’t know what to do.”

That there may have been the first time she’d made a statement that was factually correct.

Dad brightened up when Lesley’s sister arrived.

“He seemed much happier to see her than he does when I arrive. Familiarity really does breed contempt.”

Lesley’s sister didn’t appear to let on how she felt about Dad’s condition. I suspect that was largely down to having gone to the airport after a day at work, not sleeping on an overnight flight and then seeing him straight after arriving in the country.

Lesley said she’d been surprised at the lengths we’d gone to to make her comfortable at Dad’s house.

“Really? He did that? For me?”

She doesn’t get it. I hadn’t done it for her. I’d done it in an attempt to reduce the level of earache that Lesley would have got had it not been done.

And The Dog’s walks? All attempts were unsuccessful. The Dog is clearly on edge because we’re both so stressed and the slightest strange noise that she doesn’t like the sound of sends her scurrying home.

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.