When I last wrote, I added a ‘stop press’ as Grandma, my mother-in-law, had just gone into hospital. Ten days later and she’s still there with an uncertain future. For us, it’s been a roller coaster of a week.
I have likened Grandma’s stay in hospital to having your car serviced. Imagine asking your local garage to, say, fit a new exhaust pipe. You phone later to see how they’re doing and they tell you how they noticed an oil leak once the car was jacked up, so they have to deal with that first. You call again the following day and you’re told the gearbox is nearly ready.
And so it has been with Grandma. We call the hospital every day; almost each time they surprise us with something else. So in addition to being admitted because of a minor stroke, she has acquired an infection which requires intravenous antibiotics. We learned yesterday the infection is septicaemia. Another time we were told how she was making progress as the oxygen has been reduced and yet we had no idea she needed oxygen.
Phoning the ward is hit and miss, we guess they must be under pressure. Sometimes the line is continuously engaged, other times it rings unanswered. Occasionally a patient answers the phone!
Today it was different. At 8:00am the hospital called us, asking us to go in. They explained they were unable to rouse Grandma and were in effect inviting us to say our farewell. Hannah drove us there. The nurse explained only one of us could go in at a time and we would have to wear PPE – gloves, mask and apron.
Grandma was 99% unresponsive when it was my turn. I held her hand and chatted but her gaunt face didn’t change. I could see her breathing and the various sensors showed her heart beat on a screen – wires and tubes all around her. I noticed her eyelid open a little and I said how Jesus loves us, we just need to believe and trust. She didn’t respond.
A few minutes later we were in the relative’s room again and were joined by a nurse, the consultant and someone else jotting our conversation down on a pad of paper. The consultant said he wasn’t sure why she has so unresponsive and would be running further tests. After this Rachel and Hannah were allowed in together and there was a little improvement with a few nods and her eyes opened a little further.
Rolling forward now to this evening, we were able to speak with her on the phone, just for a painfully short minute. The nurse said she’d had something to eat but it was clear she was still extremely weak.
As I said at the start, there is an uncertain future. We might be down to hours or days. But knowing our 94 year old is made of stern stuff, she might rally round and bounce back. Who knows? We suspect, however, if she does recover to some extent, her needs will be increasing and we are unsure if we could manage. A nursing home might be the right direction but the decision is difficult at the best of times; during these COVID times there is a shadow of helplessness looming over us all.
Progress on our house move
Our move to the dusty museum has been fairly relaxed until now. Slowly we sorted the museum and slowly we brought our possessions across. Now we have found the perfect tenant for our house, we need to get our skates on. They want virtually none of our furniture, so we have had that to deal with along with 24 years worth of clutter in the attic – children’s toys, clothes, schoolbooks plus all of our “stuff”. So some urgent decluttering is going on and, suffice to say, the wheelie bins are full.
We did have one stroke of luck. We sold our two Stressless sofas through eBay for more than we paid for them!
Decorating has stalled while we move out of our normal house. Actually we even had our guttering and fascia boards replaced this week – but on our old house – that’s just the way it goes. I am looking forward to restarting decorating but I fear there is much sorting and storing to do first, not to mention two weeks of jury service.
All in all this is quite a strange time. We have COVID looming all around, we have Grandma in hospital and fading, we have boxes everywhere and on one level, it is unsettling. But you know me…. it’s all part of life’s adventure…. the twists and turns, the ups and downs. We do what we can to steer ourselves along but life does throw a few things at us from time to time. We find our way through, we always do and even when things don’t appear to be going well, later we look back and see how it made us stronger, or helped us to understand something better. There is a point to all of this, there has to be.