THE HOUR

April 22nd, 2013 - 7.00pm

For me, it was perhaps the most unsettling and upsetting hour since this whole business began in the second week of January, if not since the whole unpleasant business began in November 2010.

My sister had been up and took on care duties for a couple of days, so I’d not heard anything for 48 hours or so, not since I’d left the two of them chatting at the hospital on Saturday afternoon, where mum had seemed much, much brighter since the previous low point of Thursday.

My sister was, however, at this point on the Monday evening, currently travelling home to the other end of the country and was effectively incommunicado.

I decided to make my usual evening visit and arrived to find my mother lying spark out on her right hand side, and fast asleep and, because I didn’t know whether this was because of some procedure which had taken place about which I didn’t know, I decided to let her sleep, and just sat in a chair at the end of a bed for a few minutes before deciding that I needed to find out more.

The staff were in a meeting, as they always seem to be when the visitors are visiting, so I headed off outside in search of a proper phone signal, but was unable to get hold of my sister, who was still in a car somewhere between where I was and Cornwall.

On my way back to mum’s bedside, I ran into a nurse I recognised who went off to find another nurse who was actually dealing with my mother’s treatment who arrived and seemed most eager to wake my mother up because she’d apparently been quite eager to talk to me earlier on.

I poked my nose around the corner of the ward and she had indeed shifted her position in her sleep but was by no means awake, but the nurse insisted that I returned to my chair at the foot of the bed, and then proceded to wake my mother up for possibly the most confusing and disturbing three-quarters of an hour of either of our lives together.

It could, of course, have been the drugs that they were pushing into her via the drip, or it could have just been that she’d been fast asleep and had been woken up so suddenly, but for much of that time she made little sense at all, and at least twice, she drifted off so completely in mid-thought that I actually thought that she’d gone and died on me…

It seemed much worse if she looked over to her right, and if she did that, the sentences would drift into nonsense, talking about the radiator cover, the instructions, people who weren’t there, floating words that were distracting her and “the people on the table…?”, although if she looked to her left, she started acting relatively “normally” again and fussing about her table being in the wrong place, her fellow patients, her weekend, her headaches, and other familiar complaints.

Having rearranged the furniture to her relative satisfaction, the unfortunate geography of this meant that I was now sitting on what was rapidly becoming the “wrong” side for lucid conversation, and, whilst I did my very best to talk calmly, softly and encouragingly about the future, my mind was screaming at me that this might be the very end and I could feel the tears pricking at my own eyes as one rolled down her cheek at one point.

At one point, she looked so like her own mother did in her last days that it quite shocked me, given that I had never really noticed any resemblance between them before.

Reluctantly, as the eight o’clock bell sounded, I left, after making sure with the nurse that someone was keeping a very careful eye on her, as I was convinced that she could slip away at any moment. I then had a very upsetting drive home, completely convinced that the telephone call would have already come from the hospital by the time I arrived there.

It hadn’t, of course, but I did now know from a voicemail message that my sister and her family had arrived home safely and, after a frustrating half hour of not being able to call her back, I did find out that she’d called the hospital and been told that mum was “fine…”, so I don’t think that all of my tales of doom and gloom were necessarily justified, and I got the distinct impression that everyone seemed to thik that I was being over-alarmist.

But I was still very worried, and went to bed completely convinced that the call would come overnight, which is never the most relaxing state of mind to be in when you really, really need to get some rest…