JUST ANOTHER DAY...

April 25th, 2013

Interestingly, had he lived, April 25th would have been my father's 89th birthday, although this caused me to have anxiety attacks overnight because I am very suspicious of the confluence of "significant dates" in my life. If one "important" thing thing happens on a particular date, you can almost be certain that another will turn up to claim it which, under the current circumstances, did not bode well for a Thursday, and, as a great man once almost said, I never really did get the hang of Thursdays...

I really ought to apologise to you, my loyal reader, as to the monotony of the topics I'm covering at the moment, but, sadly, this really is the only thing going on and it is all rather all-consuming when it comes to my thoughts.

However, that said, my morning call to the hospital that day after another anxious night received the same response as the previous one, i.e, that mum had had another "settled" night and was "stable" which is about as good as it gets, especially when her son is out there writing it up for all the world to read if it wanted to (it doesn't...) and is using crass phrases like "We're just sitting around waiting for my mother to die..." in conversations with colleagues when feeling particularly stressed.

It all comes out of anxiety, of course, or the strange sense of guilt which comes from being utterly powerless to control the situation or the outcome. However, I battled on through a frustrating working day, rang the bank to warn them that the account ought to be pretty inactive at the moment, had a brief chat with my sister who has plans to go around to mum's flat and "deep clean" some of the more neglected areas, and staggered on through until it was time for me to head homewards, where there was at least some good news that I'll tell you about another day.

After a swift microwaved tea, I clambered back into the car and drove back to the familiar old car park with an almost perfect view of the ward my mother is in, and noticed my sister looking out of the window, waiting to warn me not to put my money into one of the "pay-and-display" machines because it was "eating your change" apparently.

And so I returned to the ward where my sister had been for most of the afternoon, reading between the x-rays, and did my usual visit, and mum slept through the entire thing, which is, I'm told, probably a good thing. At one point I went off and had a lengthy chat with a nurse who was fairly honest with me about the various drugs and fluids that they were putting into my mother as she slept, how they had plans for further scans in "a couple of weeks" (which is encouraging) but that long-term use of intravenous drips can cause infections and toxins to build up (which is not). As ever, whilst mum remains "stable" and the sleep is helping her to recuperate, they don't know yet how damaged she's going to be when and if she comes out of it, and things can, unfortunately, always change on a day-to-day basis, and a bad ten minutes is all it sometimes takes.

Interestingly, it turns out that the seizures of Tuesday might very well have been caused by the stroke of two-and-a-half years ago, because they are not yet convinced that she had another one after the one last Thursday, and won't know either way until she is more conscious, which all seems very strange.

After we said our goodbyes to mum after bringing her round ever so slightly to say hello, my sister and I returned to the car park for another "little chat" which was mostly about my pre-booked "weekend away" this weekend and whether I ought to go or not.

She remains adamant that I should, that I'd only be a couple of hours up the motorway if anything were to happen, and that I really need a break. I remain unconvinced for many of the very same reasons, but my presence at the bedside at the moment does seem to be rather redundant, and sometimes it's about deciding what you might have to live with if the worst happens.

We also discussed a plan to spruce up mum's kitchen, although I'm still rather reluctant to make decisions for mum until we're absolutely sure that she's no longer in a position to make them for herself. For me, it's still about respecting her life, and her living space, and her right to make choices, and I don't think any of us have the right to make those kinds of decisions for her until it becomes absoloutely necessary, although I'm fully willing to admit that I might be wrong about that.

Especially when I see her lying there like that, surrounded by tubes and needles and, perhaps luckily, totally oblivious to pretty much all of it...