LONG, DARK NIGHT... (10)

Well, hopefully I should be able to stop giving you these daily bulletins now, given that, once again we seem to have navigated our way through the deep dark woods and are returning back to the light. I think that you might agree with me that it's been another long, hard journey and, happily, it looks as if the journey isn't quite over yet, even though both my sister and I are already feeling as if we can see into the future to a certain extent, like a pair of cynical soothsayers and our mantra of "I told you so..." when the inevitable next phase of this tragic yet farcical story unfolds in a couple of weeks.

To say that this time we really hadn't expected mum to walk away from events is something of an understatement. I hauled myself from work twice because we were told that mum really wasn't expected to last more than a few hours and my sister dragged herself through ten hours of motorway traffic because she'd been told much the same thing, and yet, here we are, a week later and things are returning back to "normal" all over again.

My lunchtime phone call from my sister appears to confirm this. Mum has been sitting out in her chair and, although she seems disinterested in food, is being sat with at mealtimes to make sure that she does actually eat, and the plan is, apparently, still to send mum home on the 17th which still sounds like madness to me, but then she can't stay there forever, can she?

Talking of madness, my sister mentioned mum's long history of bouncing back and forth between home and hospital this year and ventured to suggest that they might want to try treating her from a psychiatric point of view which, perhaps, got passed on as a suggestion, but, of course, they know best...

Ahem.

The problem is that, when mum wakes up in the middle of the night and the sleeping pills have worn off, she's kind of "asleep but not asleep" which is a very confusing state to be in and is, indeed, as I have been finding her throughout my various evening visits this week. She might very well be bright and compos mentis during a brief period in the afternoon, but that's not when the main problems occur.

Indeed this was much as she was when I arrived on Friday evening. She was fast asleep but then had to be woken up to have a pill because her heart rate was a little high, and then spent a dozy quarter of an hour or so complaining that she couldn't sleep, needed the toilet, and coughing profusely. To be quite frank, she just looked ill that evening, and didn't seem to have any memory that she'd been out of bed at all that day, or that the doctor (Dr Alice...?) had seen her very recently because of concerns about that heart rate.

The nurse on duty was very good, though, and seemed to be more aware of mum's situation than some of the others have been, filling me in on the heart situation and telling me about how concerned they were about mum not eating, but, as I returned to mum's room, she was still trying to get to sleep, and complaining that she couldn't and eventually just told me that she thought I should just go...

So I did... Although, given that I thought that this might be one of her "sleepy but not sleepy" conversations, and she might not have meant it, it was with the proviso that the nurse at least told her that I'd been that evening, even though my mother still thought that my visits were all "very late" at night...

Drifting back across the car park once again, I reflected that the weekend ahead might be slightly easier than the last one, but I still sleep with the phone by the bed every night and always expect to be woken with bad news at any time.

Anyway, I went home and passed on the latest bulletin to the family in Cornwall, who remain as flabbergasted and dumbfounded by this seemingly never-ending saga as I am...