LONG, DARK NIGHT... (2)

Technically, it wasn't a "long, dark night" at all, being a Thursday daytime, but when you've picked your title, you have to run with it, I suppose, and that particular Thursday was after all the way it was because of the long, dark night preceding it, so I suppose it still works...

Anyway, I don't have to justify any of this to anyone else, do I? If you feel as if you want to make literary criticisms, there's a platform for that at the bottom of these entries which I can inwardly digest or choose to ignore if I please, such is the awesome power that comes with the responsibility of blogging.

Oh, oh... I seem to have started off feeling a little shirty as I sat down to write this entry this morning... Perhaps we could blame the continuing stresses and sleepless nights coming from playing another "waiting game" if I wasn't usually such a curmudgeon anyway.

Still, with my sister and other members of the extended family battling their way up north because of what the hospital suggested might be going on, and arriving at their place of sleep at around two in the morning, the whole situation all turned out to be slightly less dire and desperate than had at first been imagined.

An exchange of discreet text messages informed me that they were "up and about" after about 9.00am (after I'd tried - and failed - to get an extra hour of sleep myself before starting my work for the day) and we were able to have a little chat and sort out a bit of business which needed addressing before the events of the day unfolded and, perhaps, overwhelmed us.

True, my mother's condition remains critical, and she looks as if she could fade from this life at any second, but we are reliably informed that she remains "stable" if "very poorly" and that there is little need for us to mount a bedside vigil yet.

So, having broken records to get here as soon as possible, my sister finally got to visit at about 11.00am the following day where, according to her reports later, mum did indeed not look very well at all, but there were plans to do exploratory examinations later on that afternoon for which consent forms had to be signed and which, once again, could have gone either way.

And so a sleepy, worry of a day ebbed slowly into the dusk of another evening, and we bundled ourselves into our cars and headed once again from our various points of the compass to another rendezvous outside another ward and prepared ourselves for the worst.

It was, of course, during what are pretty much the usual visiting hours anyway, and, whilst it is an unsettling and upsetting experience to watch as mum, attached to various tubes and bags, runs through a confused cycle of the same half dozen complaints and contrary observations, whilst showing occasional moments of lucidity when it comes to the name of her sleeping pills, when we had short and actually quite useless (in as far as any actually useful information was concerned) conversations with tonight's staff nurse, but, in the end it seemed that our presence was disturbing mum far more than our absence would and we drifted away into the night once more, again with no promises being made about mum's prospects, and an awful lot to think about.

An early night was called for, although rest is never one hundred percent effective when the phone sits at the bedside and might burst into life at any moment, but, in three or four separate rooms around the town, different generations of the same family grabbed whatever sleep that they could as another day was added to the list comprising my mother's life...