44 DAYS

At lunchtime on Monday, with the permission of my understanding and very tolerant employers, I packed up my stuff, got into my car and headed over to the not-quite-as-local-as-usual hospital once again and found myself a parking spot, rather ironically I felt, in the car park for the maternity unit.

I had been called because, after a seemingly endless forty-four day ordeal, thirty-nine of which were spent in two distinct and separate hospitals with an entire five days spent at her home somewhere in the middle of it all which culminated in another emergency admission, the powers that be had finally decided that they needed the bed enough to send my mother home, despite the fact that what we euphemistically refer to as “stomach issues” show little sign of having been improved by the experience.

So, after navigating the usual maze of corridors, agreeing to get a rather wonderfully patient nurse to wrangle a wheelchair to an entrance where they could wait for me to retrieve my car from the maternity unit car park and place it in a more convenient, if obstructive, spot, and being given a “grab bag” full of the latest cocktail of medicines that will add to the growing lottery of problem-solving guesses that various doctors seem to be convinced will sort it all out this time, I got her into the car and we headed back to her flat.

After the usual complicated rigmarole of depositing her back into her home and heading off to the supermarket for some basic perishables, I then discovered that the hot water supply didn’t seem to be working properly, which meant that I ended up staying far longer than would otherwise have seemed strictly necessary as we made a few telephone calls and a wise old retired plumber popped around to see if he could do anything about it, which was just as well as the mysteries of plumbing is another legacy of my Grandfather’s that he failed to pass on to me.

Still, it got slightly improved enough for me to finally bid my farewells after making her a swift meal, and I headed home to collapse onto the sofa and wonder whether this really is the end of this latest chapter in the ongoing ordeal.

The problem is, I always know that it’s just a pause. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that this is the end of it yet. This could merely be another short lull before the three nines are dialled once again in the wee small hours, and the entire sausage machine of hospital visiting will crank up and continue this seemingly endless saga.

Because, when you are stuck in the middle of it all, an end to it seems almost impossible to imagine. Well, at least one with any kind of “happy” outcome. Your darker thoughts do become preoccupied with possible endings, but you try very hard not to have to think about those, not least because of the amount of stress those possibilities are likely to bring along with them.

Instead you know that you simply can’t even say to yourself that things will be different tomorrow, or “this time next week” or even next month. All you can see are endless days stretching ahead of you where there is nothing else you can do, nothing else you can plan for except the endless cycle of visits, hastily grabbed meals, work and sleep, and the occasional grudgingly accepted day off from it, and, whilst you know that this is what “family” is supposed to be all about, sometimes it feels like the hardest job in the world.

Meanwhile, I’m still feeling exhausted and yet, despite the fact that I’m yawning like crazy and my eyelids are stinging like hell, I still find myself lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning and about as clumsy and forgetful as anything when I do finally give up the ghost and decide to get up and make a cup of tea to jump-start another day.

I’m told it’s the stress that makes me forgetful, but it’s really very difficult to tell what it is that you might be forgetting, when you’re not entirely aware that you’re forgetting anything at all. There’s the occasional nagging down that pricks at the back of the mind which reminds you that there was something that you meant to do, but you’re never convinced that it’s not just your imagination playing tricks on you and prodding at your paranoia centres.

After all, when you get to the point of being this tired, you can’t quite trust that your brain is reacting quite as it should, and so you muddle through, doing the best you can, and hope that you don’t drop any mighty clangers as you go about the “normal” parts of your life, such as it is.

This forty-four day marathon came hot on the heels of the colds that neither of us quite managed to shift over and after Christmas and mean that, so far at least, 2013 has been something of a washout.

Not only that but it’s almost impossible to plan anything, because you simply don’t know how things are going to unfold over the coming days, weeks and possibly even months. You find yourself having to defer things that you ought to be getting on with, failing to sit down and reply to that letter or email that you really ought to, and can’t even think about accepting such invitations as you might receive because you can’t promise to be anywhere specific under the present circumstances.

So if you have been ignored, or forgotten, or left in limbo, then I can only apologise and hope that you’ll understand that there are good reasons for what I fail to do, even if it might just seem as if I’m just being ignorant…

Which, of course, is what I am being really.