The second weekend arrives with things still teetering on the brink so that they could go either way. I ventured into Saturday at least relieved that I wouldn't be spending quite as much of it in a hospital as I had last week, but, given that I still felt utterly drained and exhausted by it all, that really wasn't saying much.
Still, life has to be lived, and Scandinavian furniture stores have to be visited if you want to pick up the little nick-nacks that were missing from the packs when they were delivered, and, after that, traffic and supermarket aisles have to be negotiated, and that can soon gobble up vast chunks of your day without you getting to achieve anything very much at all other than being poorer, although perhaps not as much time as we expected because we ended up in a supermarket car park having a "Car Park Picnic" for the second Saturday in a row.
Don't say I don't know how to show a girl a good time, or don't take her to the very best places.
Arriving on the ward at 2.00pm, I walked through the door just as mum was trying to call out for a nurse that she wanted to go to the toilet, so that, after we tracked one down, we had to wait outside the room for a while and had a chat to that day's Staff Nurse, who told us that she was "much the same" which was, at least an improvement on the "up and down" that my sister was told over the telephone, I found out later.
After that, we were still unable to venture into the room itself because it was time for those "two-hourly" checks to be done, and they seemed to take an age. So much so, in fact, that I set the chair which I was carrying down by the big board with all the patient names on it and sat down on it, which meant that I was able to both see what was being done and hear the odd unguarded comment like "I really don't like the sound of that cough..."
At least she was being checked, though...
I ventured in, but mum was still very sleepy and coughing an awful lot. In between the spluttering and the half-formed thoughts, she managed to mutter "I think that I'm dying..." which was all rather hear-breaking, but I was, at least, able to soothe her back to sleep properly, and her breathing seemed much better when she was actually asleep.
However, deciding that watching someone just sleeping when I badly needed to recharge my own batteries "just in case" for any imagined ordeals ahead was probably not the best use of my time, and so, rather reluctantly, we drifted away again, and I made the decision that, unless we heard that things had made a dramatic turn for the worse (which, given how mum appeared at that moment, didn't seem too unlikely), we wouldn't return for evening visiting because I really was getting far too tired.
So, with that decision made, we headed home where eventually I slumped onto the couch, rang my sister with a less than optimistic update (optimism has never come easily to me, so I'm not sure that I'm the best person for that job...), and spent the evening wondering whether the phone might ring, and dreading that it might, as we wearily and half-heartedly caught up with some of the week's TV.
Of course, cruel fate meant that I got a call asking me to answer a questionnaire which got rather short shrift but then, when you're both expecting and dreading a phone call in equal measure, they really don't know what they're doing to people when they do that...
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