BOOMERANG II

I think that we all realise now that we ought to have been paying more attention. You can blame the fatigue and disappointment and the vague sense of anger of yet another sinking “here we go again” feeling all you like, but the truth is that if we’d perhaps taken it more seriously, we might have spotted what was going on.

Even mum in her infinite “not wanting to be any trouble” way that I usually find so very troublesome, was convinced that she’d re-heated something that she ought not to have done and come down with a little food poisoning, although, to be fair, if she’d mentioned that there was blood in the vomit, I suspect that even I might have sat myself up and taken a little more notice.

As it was, it was the G.P. that spotted the mistake when she eventually turned up. I only got this second hand when the phone rang at work with another of those “They’re sending me back to hospital” calls which hangs like a sword of Damocles over my every waking and sleeping moment nowadays and is, quite frankly, getting to be a thoroughly exhausting situation to be living with.

Mum then told me in a very loud voice that she “didn’t like” this particular G.P. but it was only when she handed to phone to the G.P. so that she could try and explain a little more about what was going on that I actually realised that she was still in attendance.

Tact, eh…? Do you start to lose all sense of it when you get older…? Or do you simply not care about it any more…?

Mind you, if you read Twitter regularly, you do get the distinct feeling that some people never really had any of it in the first place…

Anyway, it turns out that (and it’s all in the blister packs of daily medicines, so it wasn’t mum’s mistake) that someone had prescribed Warfarin alongside a daily dose of Aspirin and, apparently, it turns out that this is a bit of a no-no in pharmaceutical circles and should not have been allowed to happen because it provides exactly the sort of result that was being dealt with at my mother’s flat at precisely that moment.

And so she was whisked back into hospital for the third time in two weeks and so the merry dance continues…

Of course, you do get the distinct feeling that somebody, somewhere has ballsed something up, don’t you...? After all, you do tend to trust in the fact that the medical professionals who prescribe and dispense stuff for you generally know what they are doing, and when you’re in your eighties and presented with a cocktail of little pills to take at certain times of the day, you are unlikely to question that.

You could argue that the pharmacy ought to have picked up on it, even though I know that it was a “rush job” dispensed after the pharmacy had closed on Friday evening because I was waiting with my mother in the transfer ward for the pills to be delivered last week, but even so, it’s not really their job - is it…? - to question the over-worked doctors and act as their “back-stop”...?

So my mother is back in hospital, but at least this time we can say that it was indeed absolutely necessary and not really her fault that she got herself readmitted, and they do tell me that the vomiting has now stopped, so that’s good.

But I really can’t help but get the feeling that the very people who were supposed to be helping her get home and resume her independent life again had somehow managed make pretty darned certain that she had to go back there and once again be subjected to the lottery that seems to be their “care…”