The Tipping Point

After the fall on Monday, it was a busy week of all the agencies jumping to attention. Have to put it on record that the Social Work dept and the two care agencies she uses were all brilliant and got straight on to the case. I was only mad as hell at the doctor’s home visit. It was the on–call doctor and they said she would have to phone me first. I hung around at home waiting for the call then dashed over to the flat or I would have been too late.  She didn’t phone, so she had no knowledge of what my mother’s normally like, and couldn’t see that slurring her words 48 hours after the fall wasn’t normal. Nor was the fact that she was now having trouble getting out of the chair. As I arrived at the flat I found a quick voicemail from doctor saying she’d done the visit and my mother was fine. Doctor said "give me a call back", but withheld her number, and the surgery was closed.

She is obviously too vulnerable to be on her own at all. She's been home for one week and fallen twice. One minute she wants to go into a care home and the next minute she won’t entertain it. Which is understandable. Been having this conversation for so long, of course, and I have never pressured her into anything she’s uncomfortable about. In fact have outright defended her autonomy and her right to make her own decisions. (And she flat–out refuses to have a live–in carer. Says she would feel responsibility for them, like a guest.)
I was contacting care homes and Mother perked up and went back to speaking normally. And moving better, but getting exhausted walking. Things were moving along nicely

Until Thursday afternoon when it happened again, only worse.
And it would be the only day I hadn't spent there with her.

Having run out of pre–lunch sherry, she’d found a large bottle of brandy where it always lives in the kitchen, there only to refill the little miniature she keeps by the bed to sip with water, in the middle of the night if she can’t get back to sleep. After donkey’s years of doing this, wasn’t expecting a problem. Except she didn’t know it was brandy, all of a sudden. For some unfathomable reason she thought it was beer. I dropped some stuff at her flat on the way to the hospital and found it in the fridge, one third gone. It had been unopened the evening before, when I left after putting her to bed.

So this time there’s no argument.  At 1 am Friday morning I arrived home and emailed my brother with latest details. This is most of it -
<< I'm actually home for the night. Too worried to go back to mother's flat. Needed my own space, to think clearly. Just got in. And her replacement dressing gown’s here anyway in her room. Before I left we had yet another argument about the large bottle of 'beer' I’d found in the fridge. Told me to put that beer down the drain because it was obviously poison. Being reminded gently for the fifth time that it was brandy, she went off again.  How dare I suggest it was brandy. She knew what she’d had to drink, thank you very much.
As I speak she's in a bed in the Clinical Decisions Unit on ground floor (just phoned them to clarify the heart pill dosage), then she will go up to a ward.
"Nobody has asked me what I want" she said when I said I’d take her clothes home and get other dressing gown etc. She was not impressed by my saying it was her safety above all which mattered. We spent a long time on that one.

You could see the penny drop when she finally realised she wasn't going back to her flat or my house any time soon. Her frown was quite something. Extreme pursed lips. She was trying to find words to bully everybody into taking her home. You could see the usual reaction setting in against making any decisions about the future. Backtracking like mad, except now in a position where she couldn't do anything about it. Half an hour earlier she’d been quite excited about the home I’d been telling her about.

In the CDU I said "I've put your slippers here by the bedside cabinet".
"In case I need them to run away" she shot back.

Between A&E and the CDU, we went through a glassed-in connecting corridor. She was amazed to see it was pitch black outside. For the umpteenth time in six hours it was explained that this has been the evening, not the morning. She didn’t really believe the nurse either.

Going to eat 4 lamb cutlets and go to bed.

xx
Oh and when I mentioned you were coming up tomorrow or Saturday she said "Where will he come to?"
"Well wherever you are. Here at the hospital, probably."
And she looked so angry.
I'm not used to her being like this. Usually she's so glad to be looked after and to feel safe. But I think she's scared. >>