CRY "WOLF!"

9 September, 2013

In many ways, it was my mother's own fault.

After eight months of us living on the edge, not knowing when she was going to ring having had yet another (perhaps) imagined crisis and then being told that there was nothing wrong with her, a certain amount of inevitable fatigue had set in.

So that this time, we were not really disposed towards leaping into action for the umpteenth time.

My sister received a “bewildered and not feeling very well” call at 4.30am, as did my answering service five minutes later. In the intervening time, and in direct opposition to what my sister had suggested, my mother had phoned an ambulance.

When I finally checked my own messages at around nine o'clock, after my sister had rung my mobile and asked whether mum was back in hospital, I found the short message explaining that she'd done this from about 4.35am and I also found a message from one of the carers who had arrived to find an empty flat at 8.40am.

A couple of calls from my sister and we discovered that mum was once more on an “assessment ward” and that they had “all the telephone numbers they needed” in order to contact us. A later call suggested that the hospital were less than pleased with my mother because they couldn't find anything wrong with her and were going to send her home... There are also starting to be implications (at least according to what my sister is telling me) that she may have actually attempted to “cry wolf” once too often. As ever, when you sit down and talk to her, she remains in a state of denial about this, but the doctors seem to have become aware (at last) that they’re dealing with a very stubborn personality who simply will not be told anything because she knows best.

And then...

Then there was nothing.

Not a thing.

For twenty hours.

The next morning, concerned by this angry silence, we called the hospital to find out that she'd been transferred to another ward and that they'd been “trying to ring the contacts all day...”

These contacts were, it transpired, to a man who has been dead for over a year and a church minister who has now moved on to another job.

So, despite the number of months my mother has spent in hospital this year, and the number of times I've given the hospital ALL of our contact numbers, and the number of times that they've actually rung me, it seems that for this particular admission, all of that had been lost or forgotten and somehow become detached from her records....

Kind of gives you confidence, doesn't it...?

Not only that, but then they wouldn't accept my mobile number from my sister over the telephone but told us that they could only take contact numbers from the patient themselves...

This did, of course, finally all get sorted out when the paperwork caught up with the patient around about twenty-four hours after admission, and we were able to start having conversations about the current crisis. There was much talk to us about how they were stressing to my mother that it is really, really important that she takes in enough food and fluids when she's at home, although, when I finally got around to visiting that evening, more than 36 hours after admission, she seemed to be in a state of denial about this.

It might have been due to the severe back pain I was struggling along with, but I went with the intention of being quite stern with her, only to find her in the middle of being cleaned up after another catastrophic bowel "incident" and about to be pumped through with another drip full of magnesium, facing up to the prospect of "at least a week" of further tests. The fact that the cannula was hurting her arm, and that the ward itself resembled some vision of bedlam, meant that I ended up being polite again in the face of some interesting exchanges:-

"This hurts!"

"You may have pushed the needle in when you pressed your arm against your body..."

"You always find a way of making it my fault!"

and...

"I feel as if I'm being a bloody nuisance!'

(Amiably, without malice) "Yes... Yes you are..."

"You're supposed to come here and cheer me up not tell me what a nuisance I'm being!"

"Well, you said it first and I've found that it's generally easier just to agree with you..."

Happy days are here again...