Thursday

Not much to be said about today except that it sounded horrendous. The day had started with a regular call from the lung cancer team at The Hospital in Oxford. I didn’t overhear much as Lesley wandered around the house trying to find somewhere to stand where the signal was stable enough to hold a reasonable conversation but the tone sounded supportive, informative and empathetic. The MRI scan was discussed. It felt like an eternity since I’d taken him to The Hospital for that but it was only 3 weeks ago. They’d said at the time that we would have to wait 4 weeks for any results. The doctor said she would try to chase them up. After that The Dog’s morning walk was kept short so that Lesley could get to her dad as early as possible.

Dad had had a terrible night. He’d been shouting for most of it.

The yelling continued all day too.

“HELP ME!! HELP ME!!”

He refused anything to eat or drink and was hallucinating “like a good ‘un”. Angry, Anxious, Agitated and in Agony. Picking at things he could see floating in front of him, pointing half way up the wall opposite his bed and saying there was water puddling on the floor. And screaming. Screaming in pain and frustration.

The end of life meds he’d been prescribed are a toolkit that the nurses can select from depending on how the patient is doing and where they are on their journey. It will contain stuff to manage pain, agitation and a number of other symptoms in a patient’s final days or hours.

At least he wasn’t refusing meds now. The problem seemed to be that nothing was working. It was made worse because having had a dose of something he then couldn’t have another or an alternative within a certain period of time. And he was as agitated as ever.

At one point he’d asked for a cup of tea. Lesley duly toddled off and made him one.

“Is that alright?”

He pulled a face.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“IT’S TEA!!”

In his more lucid moments he would scold anyone in earshot. Not even Lesley’s sister escaped his attention. Yep, even her. She was “too bossy” apparently. Who knew?

Watching my Mum’s final hours had been horrific. This sounded worse. Much worse.

Lesley was exhausted when she got home. Unsurprisingly.

“Oh, did that doctor call you back about his MRI?”

“Yeah, she said the cancer had progressed but not enough to explain all the pain he was in. What she said was that all the discs in his spine are compressed and bulging. If they’re pressing on his spinal chord then that would explain the pain.

“She also said she was going to support his fast track end of life care funding application and was writing to the palliative care team to tell them he’d declined steeply since Christmas.”

Lesley had been told something else that didn’t sound good. The nurse had noticed that he was having difficulty swallowing. He was OK getting food or meds to the back of his mouth – the conscious part of swallowing – but it was the automatic, unconscious, autonomous part that was failing and what he was swallowing was getting “stuck” halfway between his throat and his stomach.

It was a failing swallow reflex that did for my Mum. She didn’t last long after that.

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.