NORMAL SERVICE RESUMES

I’m rather hoping that my life might just be able to approach something approaching “normality” (whatever that is) once again now that my mother’s latest 23-day incarceration in hospital finally came to an end last Sunday, with the usual strange phenomenon of being told that she can go home being coupled with the oddly slow-moving wheels of actually getting that done.

Hospitals have their own internal logic when it comes to administrating such matters, few of which, I suspect, would be tolerated in the world of business, but it seems perfectly acceptable to keep people waiting for hours whilst the glacial movement of the internal transportation system moves those vital drugs from one department to another, and a request for a wheelchair can add significantly to the waiting time for people who it is blindingly obvious are going to need such things in place before they are going to be able to go home.

And… breathe…

Still, when it comes to the ongoing situation of having an elderly and rather curmudgeonly relative staying in hospital for a reasonable length of time, unless you’re dealing with a similar situation yourself, I genuinely think that it’s difficult for me to communicate to you quite how exhausting it can be to be making those regular journeys to visit as often as you can whilst trying to fit the rest of what you used to think of as your “life” around it, and when those visits can become as grim as mine seem to, due to a relationship which I should charitably describe as “complicated”, well it does tend to grind you down after a while.

Even fitting your own meals in, or getting to a supermarket, or finding opportunities for something like taking a bath, or addressing the significant collection of washing-up you’ve accrued, can be difficult when your adding journey times to visiting times and subtracting them from the evening after the working day and the commute is over.

After that, anything that you might want to do, all those little projects that you had in mind to make a start upon, or all of those little jobs which need doing around the house, or just any of the things that you might want to think about doing as a kind of mental release, and the things which you really ought to do but have somehow forgotten all about in the melee, all fall by the wayside when the best you can manage is to make a phone call to pass on a message or a status update before zonking out in front of the TV for an hour and then heading up to try and grab something resembling sleep.

It’s the night terrors, and the possibilities of what might happen, and the constant sense that your own health is struggling to keep in the necessary first-rate (Hah!) condition that keeps you awake at night, alongside the analysis of all of your many shortcomings which have been pointed out to you over and over again during this time.

Even the few things you do achieve are never wholly able to be concentrated upon, as there’s the constant nagging fear that the telephone might ring at any moment, day or night, and a situation which already seemed to be spiralling out of control might just manage to get even worse.

Around all of that, you still try to maintain a few of the essentials of your life. You still get yourself to work and struggle through as best you can with that, and you try and keep your interpersonal relationships as civil as you can whilst feeling just to tired to bother with the most important things in life, and somehow you struggle through and manage to maintain something approaching “normality” even when you begin to forget what such a thing was even like.

Anyway, now that “normal service” has been resumed, you never know, but perhaps I’ll find something rather more interesting to write about over the next few weeks…