HOSPITAL UPDATES W/C 070713 (PART TWO)

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

A phone call about 11.45 (just about the time the first wicket fell, apparently) is from my mother telling me that she will be going to Marbury House on Friday. She didn't want to go to Marbury House, she says, but if she wanted to go anywhere else "You'd have to pay..." Meanwhile, she's "left a message" for my sister which basically means that she's out.

"So" I say "You've not actually spoken to her, then...?" I ask.

"No, but you could ring her..."

If only I had the time, mother. If only I had the time...

Thursday, July 11th, 2013

Well, here we are.

Exactly six months in.

I don't look forward at all to tonight's visit but it does, at least, have the possibility about it of being the last time.

For a little while, at least.

My sister rings for an update, but there's little I can say other than to complain about how ghastly I imagine things are likely to get. Still, she's due to arrive for a visit next Thursday, so we'll have to see if that can take the edge off. Given how much I complained about the entire hospital experience with the beloved's parents over dinner yesterday evening, I'm beginning to think that it might take a while for those memories to fade...

After another blisteringly hot and (professionally) exasperating day, I wend my weary way through the traffic to that most familiar of car parks, feed another £2.00 coin into the meter, and head onto the ward once more. "As far as I know" says my mother ("Because they never tell me anything", "You should ask them", "If only people took a bit of an interest", etc.) we are still "on target" for her to be moved on come Friday, but nobody seems to be holding their breath or betting the house on it.

Controversy of the day has been mum's reaisation that all of the nightwear she has with her is "Winter nightwear" to which I plead ignorance, telling her I just grabbed a load out of the drawer.

Her pithy "You would!" is immediately followed by her departure for the lavatory leavig me alone to listen to the other activities on the ward ("Urgh!") as ward life goes on ("Urghh!!") around me both in front of and behind closed curtains.

Mother returns and asks me if I have scissors on me to cut her nails, and then, because of this massive failure on my part, manages to borrow a pair so that I can cut them for her, although her complaints that I can't hell flesh from nail might mean that she doesn't ask me again any time soon. This is all done to the soundtrack of the most piercing and endless whistles as a machine somewhere sounds its alarm and is ignored by everyone for five minutes until a nurse turns up and switches it off. She leaves and the thing goes off again and sounds for another five minutes until it is, thankfully, finally silenced again.

Mother's conversation after this is mostly to do with "suddenly" feeling "old and useless" and pondering cheerily on whether "It would have been better if I had died..." but at least this prompts the nearest thing I can manage to a pep talk and we discuss (in that one-sided way we have) the benefits of her going into intermediate care, even though I insist that it doesn't matter where it is.

After all, once I know where they're sending her to, I'll be able to find it.

When prompted, I find out that the church Minister did visit on Wednesday (not that she recognised him again), but her tales of his visit to Amsterdam are interrupted by a nurse making a cannula check who promises to "find out" about mum's imminent release but who then fails to reappear.

Instead, as I pack up for the evening, I reluctantly approach the desk and am pointed in the direction of the one nurse I had a bit of an issue with, all those Thursdays ago. Ah well, she seems to have forgotten me as we discuss the fact that mum leaving the ward is "Still the plan, but..." as they'll be waiting for a prompt from social services before they order up an ambulance, but she won't be needing me to bring any clothes or anything like that, but they will "keep me informed" as to what's happening.

I return to the bedside and bid my farewells to both mum and the patient in the next bed and her father, both of whom have been very kind, and head away, perhaps for the last time, at least for a while, and then I spend a hot half an hour waiting in a car park for the beloved to meet up with me, such is the excitement of my life beyond those hated doors.

Friday, July 12th, 2013

I'm so very exhausted now that I struggle to find the energy to actually get up at all. Even writing up these notes has become too much of an effort, but there you have it.

Meanwhile, Friday itself turns into a bit of a waiting game. I spend the day constantly on edge and wondering quite when the telephone will ring, and, by the end of the working day, when it quite blatantly hasn't, I'm rather at a loss as to quite what to do.

Typically, I arrive home to two messages from mum from around about lunchtime and directed at precisely where I am not. The first states that her drugs have arrived so that she can be packed off but "no doubt" the hospital will be letting me know where she is. The second that she's (helpfully) terminating her hospital telephone account and I should let my sister know this.

Also very typical is that I have heard nothing else whatsoever on any of my three phones, but I doubt that my mother will believe any of that. When I finally do manage to get through to the ward, they tell me that they've been "trying to contact me" but I refuse to believe much of what they are telling me any more.

So mother is now in the mysterious hands of "intermediate care" and, also typically, I can't get anyone to answer the phone there, either... at least not for a while. When I do manage to get a reply, the person answering the phone promises to take the phone up to mum in "about half an hour" but then doesn't and, after another hour of no replies, I do get someone to do precisely that and we finally have a conversation and I am able to find out whether there are any restrictions upon visiting.

There are none, so a hefty chunk of Saturday looks as if it might be spent running around in a brand new (but also somehow slightly familiar from our lives many years ago) part of the world, and, it seems that I might have to buy mum a mobile phone because otherwise that's going to become a brand-new bone of contention...

Let this new phase of joyfulness begin...