The last month has been something of a blur really as I have juggled trying to continue doing my work with an endless stream of hospital visits and the looming monster that was the coming of Christmas. I know I get a bit of a reputation for being less than unduly festive sometimes, but this time round it was positively ill-timed and passed by in a necessarily low key kind of a way.
A month has now passed since that fateful Sunday morning that I described to you all yesterday, and we have settled into the routine of hospital visiting. Generally during the working week, I leave the 2.00PM-4.00PM slot to the GMF and other friends of mums, not least because many of them are getting fairly elderly themselves and the December ice has been lethal hereabouts. I tend to use the 7.00PM-8.00PM evening slot for myself (and sometimes the beloved). It’s not the greatest of timings when you’re trying to juggle meeting delayed trains, eating some kind of an evening meal and travelling in through treacherous weather, but you have to do it, don’t you?
Nowadays I’m very familiar with where the various hospital car parks are in relation to the wards to reduce the required walking which in turn reduces the risk of slipping on the ice. The fees are £2.00 for up to 2 hours, £3.00 for 3-4 hours, and £5.00 for 4 hours or more, although as a calendar day clicks around at midnight, all the fees reset to zero and you have to start piling in the cash again. This can be another little anxiety to add to your worries as you sit and wait for answers late into the night (about which more later). No matter how many staff might tell you that it’ll be fine, you still have visions of the hospital clampers whizzing out into the car parks at 00.01 hours and earning the NHS a small fortune in release fees.
I’m also now overly aware of how the combined phone/TV/Internet machine works. It’s a fine little gadget that hangs over pretty much every bed (in many ways I wish I could get one) and gives the patients free telephone calls to certain numbers, free radio and paid access to internet and TV services. The patient is designated a telephone number which remains active even if you’ve changed beds of been discharged and readmitted (about which more later). Of course to ring in on this number is not free to friends and family. It works out at about 50p per minute which would be fine if you didn’t have to spend nearly two minutes listening to messages telling you this and other statements that tell you what you already know, like “You are calling someone who is in hospital” (No sh*t, Sherlock) and “This number may have appeared on your phone because they have tried to ring you”. If I ever meet that bloke who reads those messages, I may well feel inclined to threaten him with harm…
And I had actually wondered for a while how they could afford to give free calls to the patients…. oh, I can be so naïve.
For the TV or Internet, you have to buy cards from a dispensing machine in £5, £10, £15 or £20 combinations which buy the services in £5 (one day), £10 (three day) and £15 (six day) chunks (amongst other package options I have not yet investigated). The card is then inserted into the device and credit is added to the account and, by a fiendishly simple method of pushing buttons that have been known to utterly bamboozle even brain-mashed computer literates like myself, and are most definitely almost certain to befuddle the elderly and infirm, you get your choice of service set up for those lengths of time.
Oh, and by he way, a four finger Kit-Kat is 52p in the hospital shop. This shows what a "cost of everything, value of nothing" kind of a guy I am...
Mum keeps telling me she’ll pay me back, no matter how often I tell her I don't want her to, and I’m constantly trying to reassure her it’s not about the money. Although, on moodier days, she’ll wonder why it is that she has to ring everyone and nobody ever seems to ring her, and I’ll feel the need to explain that maybe it IS sometimes about the money when the GMF is trying to survive on his pension and my sister staggers along on her invalidity benefits.
So, where were we…?
NOV 29 – DEC 05
Having left my mum at the hospital in an actual bed at 8.00 PM the day before, I headed home and spent a couple of hours on the phone with my faraway sister and mum’s GMF and staggered to bed. Monday dawned and it was my sister’s birthday, although I’d not really slept all that well, but my spirits were slightly lifted by a reader sending me a very uplifting email response to “Zero”, that I read about 4.00 A.M. Monday morning.
I spent much of that Monday feeling quite angry about the events of the day before, because I still think that letting a suspected stroke victim wait in a chair for the best part of eight hours after being sent there by a GP isn't really the best way of treating it. Eventually, mum rang me and told me that a Senior Doctor had turned up about 11.00 and she’d been whisked off for tests and had indeed had a stroke (albeit a comparatively minor one).
Over the course of the next week, there was a relocation to the specialist stroke ward and, for mum, things slipped into a rather tense routine of tests and readings and the general routine of life on a hospital ward and for those of us on the outside, our own little routine of work, visits, phone calls and worry. Then, of course, on Tuesday the 30th we woke up to the first “proper” snowfall that proved so disabling to much of the country and added to the fun of getting to and from the flat and the hospital no end, but we generally managed it without too many problems. There was one horrible evening when I was visiting and they decided part way through my visit to move her from the high risk to the lower risk areas of the ward. This, of course, should have been seen as progress. However, instead it led to a lot of confusion as mum had just settled herself in and seemed to feel “safe” and “comfortable” just where she was, and had even decided that a bit of TV might be a nice thing to have available and, having spent a couple of days getting used to being where she was, absolutely hated being moved and disorientated again, and there was a lot of fuss about where her things precisely were on her bed-table which got a little bit unpleasant.
I suppose I should have expected a certain amount of tension as mum adjusted to the change in her life and lashed out a little at the unfairness of life and the devastating holes that had been punched in her meticulously organised pre-Christmas planning. Sometimes this meant the staff and her fellow patients were the subject of her displeasure, and sometimes it was me for not being able to buy the right magazine or bring the right thing from the flat. After all, one address book with flowers on the cover can look very like another when it’s not yours.
During that week I found myself writing phrases down in my diary like:
“I feel so utterly out of my depth today”
“I’m not by nature a natural carer, this does not mean I don’t care, but the whole world of hospitals and stuff is something I find no pleasure in having to deal with…”
“The worst thing about visiting the wards is the sense of your own future it can bring. A lot of the people you see in such misery aren’t really that much older than I am in real terms. Add thirty years and I’m there and it’s quite frankly terrifying…”
Thirty years ago seems like the blink of an eye some days.
Then, after a week or so, it was decreed (with a fair amount of unfriendly persuasion on my mother’s part I’m sure) that she was fit to go home…
But that’s another story.
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