STROKE…?

It was obvious when you looked at her that something was wrong.

I arrived as a nurse was making the first of three attempts to draw blood from veins which had “blown” and mum was muttering about my sister coming to visit tomorrow and her son being there later. She really wasn’t able to see me as I sat six feet away at the end of the bed letting the professionals do their jobs, even when the nurse asked her “Is this your son?” and I waved, the response was still that I’d be coming later…

As I waited sister came over to speak to me about the fact that sometime earlier in the day, she’d had what they suspected to be a stroke and that they had done some MRI scans earlier which had been “inconclusive” and that she was due to have a (now finally being scheduled) gastroscopy because they needed to know whether the stomach problems she’d been admitted with nine days earlier meant that they couldn’t administer the necessary blood-thinning drugs.

I was being told all this because they had, apparently, been trying to ring my sister to let her know “all afternoon” but there was precious little evidence of this on any of her phones when I rang a few minutes later from the bedside and got through immediately.

Ah well, let’s be kind and say that, in all of the confusion, they perhaps got given an incorrect number…

Once the nurse had finally managed to draw blood and not answer my questions as to whether any of this might have been due to the “lump” mum had discovered in her throat and reported to the staff a couple of days earlier (“We’re waiting for haematology to come and have a look at it…”) I sat down next to the bed and held my mother’s hand.

She was, quite obviously, both very confused and quite distressed, not least from the various needle-pokes that she’d just endured, and I wasn’t really sure whether she was certain about who I was, or where I was, given her current state of partial blindness.

She couldn’t, for example, see me waving my right hand right in front of her face, but could see my left hand as I continued to hold hers with it. She was continuously looking around all the time as if discovering the world around her for the first time and finding it all rather baffling. The same thoughts would come to the forefront of her mind on a two minute cycle and get repeated as if they were occurring to her for the very first time…

And yet, she was still sharp as a tack when it came to the names of certain people who’d been to visit, or facts about their lives… So it was just the “right here, right now” that seemed to be causing problems.

Which is fair enough, I suppose… If I was going through something similar, I think I wouldn’t want to remember it either.

As I said, I did manage to telephone my sister to fill her in on developments, the timing of which were all rather unfortunate as she already had a drive up country to make a visit planned for the very next day. At one point I handed the phone to my mum who spoke to her for a while, but the entire conversation was already forgotten just ten minutes later.

The most heartbreaking thing was that she seemed so very scared to go to sleep that night whilst, at the same time, kept on worrying about whether she’d sleep and kept on repeating “I don’t know what’s going to happen…” and each time that I tried to reassure her, the same thought would pop into her head again shortly afterwards and get her all agitated again. Of course, I couldn’t quite work out whether she was scared to sleep because she thought that she might never wake up, or that she wanted to sleep but was worried that the general levels of noise on the ward would prevent her from doing so.

In the end, after a lot of dithering on my part, I decided that it would be better if I left, partly because I didn’t know what else to do, and partly because I kind of thought that staying might have convinced her that things were far worse than perhaps they were. After all, the staff were already discussing another brain scan in “about two weeks”, so they didn’t appear to have any immediate concerns about her imminent deterioration.

Leaving was very difficult, but I drove home even though I was fully expecting to get there and find that there’d already been a call asking me to urgently return, but that didn’t happen, so instead I just had a long and troubled night wondering about how things are going to unfold.

I dropped by again the following evening and am pleased to be able to say that she seemed a lot brighter, although she is far from being back to normal. We had conversations, and her memory seemed clearer, although her water jug seemed to confuse her a lot, and, although her eyesight is still very feeble, she was making a game attempt to fill in her meal requests for the following day when I arrived.

It’s difficult, really, because, whilst I have found my mother to sometimes be a very frustrating person, and we have sometimes had a very volatile relationship, at this moment I would rather have her like that than as she is now, because it just seems so damned unfair…