Parent and Child

It's been quite a week - incident packed and full of action.

My mother who has been in one of her lows for the last two weeks and been fighting off a cold went into sudden decline over the weekend. While we were mixing with the heart of Middle England at the Watermill Theatre watching our friend Kazia Pelka being brilliant as Miss Havisham, Mum took a turn for the worse and started asking for me.

Rich, made up with cold and feeling terrible, gave up his Sunday to accompany me on the drive up to Yorkshire where we found her very low indeed.

She doesn't eat- or rather has the appetite of a bird. She has been told - and has now been told  in no uncertain terms - that she has to eat to stay alive. She just doesn't have the strength to fight off infections, and yet when not ill she remains remarkably active, fighting both arthritis and sciatica to get out most days for a bus journey and a walk to get a daily paper and have coffee with friends.

But when this cycle of exhaustion sets in she gets down and it can be impossible to rouse her. This time she has been admitted to hospital. By Monday morning she was having some frightening conversations with me. "I'm going to die and I want you here" was how we started Monday. The house had an air of still calm as she slept on Monday morning and I waited for the doctor to arrive. The calm was disturbing. She's usually bemoaning how she feels and fighting the weariness, but on Monday morning she just seemed to have given up.

When the doctor arrived she could see that Mum was worse than she had ever seen her and not her usual self. She suggested that we get her admitted to hospital. Or rather she rang the hospital and then suggested that I take her down and get her admitted! I wanted to know how I single handedly was supposed to get her up which had proved impossible for days, get her dressed, get her into the car, get her into the hospital and what was an ambulance for!
This seems to be the problem with state services these days - the intention is good but the execution of it is not.

An ambulance did arrive with two brilliant paramedics twety minutes later. To watch someone do a job of any sort with consummate skill and ease and professionalism is always a joy. To watch them do a job which is making someone you love feel better by their actions is just superb. Robert, the paramedic was absolutely brilliant. By the time I had driven to the hospital, Mum was in her trolley waiting with Robert and his colleague to be admitted.

We hear how bad the NHS is. WE arrive at any hospital fearing the worst. And yet that afternoon we only met people with immense skill at caring. Hollie, the nurse, Carol the registrar, Claire the junior Doctor, all treating my mother with a care and attention that was touching.

Having run a village shop for forty years, I have never yet taken my Mum on a visit to the hospital where she hasn't been recognised by someone. Her celebrity is huge and the receptionist and the administrator were both keen to come to her bed and say "Bet you don't remember me" and of course she doesn't at all, but she nods wisely as they tell her how as a child they came in her shop everyday, and then eventually she'll say "Well fancy meeting you in here". She's a cunning old vixen. It's this cunning that has got her there in the first place. The cunning lying to me on the phone about how much she has eaten each day. Her idea of a glass of Lucozade is just that. She opens the bottle, and pours a glass. She carries it to her table. It sits there for several hours while she may have one sip and then she carries it back to the sink unfinished and throws it away. That will then provoke the answer on the phone to me that evening "Oh Yes, I had a glass of Lucozade this evening" as in "I had a glass of Lucozade beside me all evening as a permanent companion which I did not partake of".  She doesn't lie - she's just extremely flexible with the truth.

It's all been very draining for all parties concerned.  While we pay for our housework to be done in darkest Sydenham, here I have been washing sheets, changing beds, and cleaning out the fish and it's humbling and yet strangely rewarding.

I'm sure we'll all be celebrating Mum's 90th later this month and this will be all behind us. Or in front of us if we can't change her behaviour.

What was it that Shakespeare (or the Earl of Oxford depending on who you believe) said.......

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness.....

Who's the Daddy? (that bit's not Shakespeare!)