reading

Dad is a reader but, since the stroke, he seems daunted by books and so I am taking him magazines instead. I don't know what he will make of the National Geographic.

in burma

I took Mum her first medication of the day and she said that she had dreamed about a Japanese prisoner of war camp. 'It was strange,' she said.

28 november

It is difficult for Mum to visit Dad. Low on energy, hobbled by arthritis, mentally adrift and much more fearful than she was as a younger woman, she finds it an ordeal just to leave her home let alone travel the ten or so miles to the hospital. But the fact remains that she needs to see him and so on Thursday evening Pete and Helen came round and helped me to walk Mum up the slippery stone pathway to the car and lift the old wheelchair into the boot. Pete drove while I sat in the back holding Mum’s hand and listening to her constant stream of talk. She never goes out after dark now. The route looks different – are those buildings new? How does Dad look – will she have a shock when she sees him? She could stay in a B&B near the hospital. (No.) She hasn’t got a present for him. She never goes out after dark now. The route looks different – are those buildings new? How did Dad look yesterday?

Pete stops outside the building labelled ‘Women and Children’. Why is the stroke ward in the same place as Obs and Gynae? Women and Children first. Make way you bloody coward and be a man.

It takes time to help Mum out of the car and into the chair (which barely fitted into the boot). The traffic has been more congested than usual and we have just fifteen minutes before visiting ends at 19.00. I’m fairly confident that, if I explain, they will give us an extra half hour but my heart is pounding and I feel like a character in some cinematic ‘race against time’. Will they get there before the bomb explodes? Before she gets on the plane and our hero loses her for ever? And of course we do. (The bomb never explodes. The hero always gets the girl.) We take the lift up, Mum staring at the mirrored back wall because I’m not so good at turning the chair. I wheel her onto the ward and look to the right, towards the little bay where the sight of my Dad in the bed by the window has become powerfully familiar in just a matter of days. He isn’t there. The room is empty. For a moment I feel as if something atrocious has happened. Enemy soldiers have taken the hospital and turned the patients out into the dark. Is he crawling along the dual carriageway, heading for home through the belting rain? But no – he has been moved to another bay and in we go. He is there to the left of the doorway. I push Mum to his bedside.

The reunion moves me. They seem so small. (They are, I suppose. Eighty-something Welsh people tend not to be giants.) The emotion is on the surface. (It always is but, for once, it feels right and good to me.) Mum stares into Dad’s face and satisfies herself that he is still himself – he hasn’t changed beyond recognition. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she says, struggling to get out of the chair and go to him. There are obstacles between them – physical ones: the foot-rests on the chair, the bars across the side of the hospital bed, bodies that don’t do what they are willed to do, furniture that is positioned more with medics than visitors in mind. But they manage and for a moment I think, ‘This is going well – much better than I’d imagined.’

But then he breaks the mood. ‘I want to talk to Rich about some practical things,’ he says. ‘Maybe you should sit with Pete and Helen.’

My heart is in my mouth as I wheel her out into the corridor (where she will work herself into a storm of suspicion and, after all, why wouldn’t she?) I leave her with my friends and I head back towards the bed to face the music.

hospital blankets

premonitions

This was my father's second stroke. It came exactly a year after the first - a year to the day. He had become quite superstitious about the anniversary and that was why I was in the house last weekend. He wanted me to be around on the night of 21 November.

27 november

I am in my mid-forties. My parents are in their 80s. Last week, early on Sunday morning, my father had a stroke. I was visiting for the weekend and I found him on the floor of the bathroom – conscious and able to speak to me but with a distorted voice and gripped by a weakness that stopped him from standing or even moving his body into a more comfortable position. I called emergency services and the ambulance arrived. The paramedics spoke with my father, lifted him to his feet, took him from the house in a wheelchair. I was surprised at how long the ambulance stood outside the house, parked on a bend in a busy road - a place where no other vehicle could stop. They were there so long that I began to wonder if Dad  had died - why else would they act with such apparent lack of urgency? Eventually, though, they pulled away and the view from the window was normal once again. (I forget what the weather was like – grey, I think, but not raining.)

I went to talk to my mother. She has dementia and she hadn’t woken up. I suppose my father had tried to call out but he couldn’t raise his voice or make himself heard. It was a conscious decision to let her sleep through my father’s leaving. I was sure he wouldn’t die. She would see him again. And if she witnessed the paramedics taking him from the house, she would panic (I thought). It would all be much too disturbing. I wasn’t convinced of this then and I’m still not sure that I was right. Perhaps I am just a coward. (That seems quite possible.) Almost a week later I am still in my parents’ house, trying to help my mother through an experience that is tough enough for someone with all their faculties and particularly so for someone with dementia (especially when her son is an irritable bugger). She asks the same questions again and again. What is a stroke? What causes it? Is it something we’ve done? When will they let him go?

I have started to write a diary because it strikes me that even in the past week the picture has changed a number of times – first morning alone with my mother, first visit to the hospital, first conversation with social services, first estimate of how long my father will be away. I have become very conscious of this sense of a changing picture and, while I don’t have time to write very much, 300 words a day might help me to remember how it happened.

Enough for today. More tomorrow. Mum needs her tea and her first medication of the day.