LONG, DARK NIGHT... (12)

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13th, 2013

Sometimes Sunday afternoon is all about sitting in a car park and trying not to weep.

It began innocuously enough with a failed attempt at fitting the extra nick-nacks to a wardrobe when I found out that the whatnots which we'd driven all the way to the flatpack furniture store to get yesterday were the wrong whatnots, and so we braved the rains and the storms and queued up again to get what were hopefully the correct doohickeys this time.

So far, so Sunday...

We returned home to grab a bite to eat and then, sighing deeply with the kind of sigh born out of reluctance that only someone going through a similar experience could possibly understand, we headed once again to the hospital for afternoon visiting.

I arrived and was immediately mugged by the invisible man in that one of my pound coins for the parking machine seemed to be pulled from my hand as I tried to put it into the coin slot, and vanished into mid air, never to be found. Not by me at any rate, despite looking around for it everywhere. This was strangeness indeed, and did at least give me something else to think about as we trudged wearily up to the ward again.

The staff were very concerned about how pale my mother was, and that she wasn't eating again, and informed me that a doctor was on the way as they took mum's blood pressure and temperature for the thousandth time. When we got in the room ourselves, trying to avoid the "wandering old man" who seemed displeased that he was being denied access to these "infection control" rooms, mum was now on an oxygen tube but sleeping mostly, and trying to talk but not really succeeding. Chats with the nurses maintained the sense that mum was "very poorly" and attempts to put a nebuliser face mask on mum's mouth and nose were having limited success because she kept on removing it, so much so that the nurse told me how to switch it off if mum removed it again and she wasn't in the room.

Eventually, however, after the usual calls for assistance with her ablutions, mum dozed off again and seemed calm enough for us to leave again, with me getting quite emotional and wondering whether this would be the last time, which is how I ended up in that car park, and making a phone call to my sister in order to just try and hold things together.

We returned in the evening after the doctor had been "again" and my conversation with a very upbeat Ward Sister informed me that mum was "very poorly" when I followed her out of mum's room and tried to get her to give me as frank an answer as she could.

It had been, she said, a difficult afternoon for my mum.

Another junior doctor came to mum's bedside and we had a very frank discussion about her prospects, with the proviso that any decisions about how to manage her condition would have to be passed up the chain of responsibility to the consultant.

Basically, though, they are struggling to find any veins to put intravenous lines into, and have to consider using "sub-cut" canulas which don't sound pleasant, but mum's arms now swell up whenever they try to put a line in. Mum is also struggling to swallow, and the fluids that they need to put in to stop the kidneys from failing put extra pressure on mum's failing heart and lungs, so they're rather stuck with trying to decide which of her now many conditions to treat and how best to make mum "comfortable" as it appears that the inevitable is fast approaching...

I was able to make mum smile briefly, though, in one of her rare moments of wakefulness, when, overhearing another - possibly dementia - patient screaming at the staff repeatedly to "Go away!" I was able to say to mum "You see? You're still not the patient who's the most trouble on this ward..." before she dozed off again.

Thankfully, she isn't awake for most of the stuff going on around her and, whilst the staff checked that they definitely had all of my emergency numbers, we discussed the fact that the consultant would be seeing mum on Monday morning and that a doctor "would be made available" for me to talk to during afternoon visiting that afternoon to discuss the best ways to make mum "comfortable..."

Euphemisms aside, we really are starting to believe that this might be "it" and I conveyed my thoughts upon this to my sister when I got home, but I didn't have the "stiff whisky" that one of the nurses suggested that I ought to have, simply because there was still a chance that I may have to drive to the hospital at any time following the dreaded ring of a telephone...