Or this may have been the other way around. I might have rung her and then the hospital and made the arrangements. My mind is so fritzed that it's really hard to tell. The result was the same anyway. I sat around trying to make sense of a project I was attempting to continue working on and, for some of the awful waiting time at least, tried to distract my mind by contributing to the stupid word games that I throw my thoughts into between cups of coffee.
It helps, believe me, to have something else to think about, even for a few moments.
The call came about three. The doctor's prognosis had not been good and of the "If we can't stop the bleeding..." variety and my sister suggested that I drop everything and head over to the hospital as soon as I could because it really seemed as if another ending was looming, although, as ever, we underestimated quite what a tough old bird my mother is.
I arrived at the bedside at around three-thirty having attempted as best as anyone can to prepare themselves for a long and probably very difficult evening, and miraculously found a daytime parking spot and fed the meter up to midnight and there then followed a rather long waiting game in which we tried to talk to our mother as she faded in an out of sensibility and tried her very best to get comfortable and get some sleep whilst obsessing on things like telephones and groceries when she didn't really know where she was, and talking about things like the Garrick Theatre in her more lucid moments.
But we held her hand and talked to her and, perhaps most importantly, were there...
Mum's temperature began to rise and there was a certain amount of involuntary twitching which concerned us as yet more drugs were pumped but, perhaps because she was very scared, sleep would still not come, apart from the occasional doze when an exclamation like "Chips!" would emerge from the depths of her mind.
Typically, after a doctor had been and ordered up another chest X-ray, mum finally managed to get properly asleep only to be woken up by a nurse who wanted to give her some medicine to try and bring her temperature down, but, luckily mum managed to get to sleep again after that and was sound asleep and "as stable as possible" when my sister and I decided that this might be a good time for us to slip away and try to snatch a few hours sleep ourselves because it was looking as if we might yet be facing at least another day of very similar experiences, and might need all of the energy we could muster.
And so, despite it being a wrench and a worry to go, we left and headed our separate ways into another long, dark night...
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