The visit yesterday really was the pits. It was so bad about an hour in I started having chest pains.
At first I thought I was having problems digesting. I do have Barrett’s oesophagus, some days stuff just doesn’t go down well. I keep indigestion medication there, so, though the pains began while I was eating, straight afterwards I went upstairs and took a couple of pills. Downstairs it was so awful I went out into the garden on the pretext of helping my other half to water the garden. After half an hour or so the pains subsided. It didn’t help that we went in the S&H’s car, where the radio doesn’t work. The other half demanded I stay awake and talk in case he fell asleep and killed us on the way home. After several hours at home I began to feel normal. This morning I rang when I knew as my mother’s hairdresser would be there and told the senior carer to tell my mother I had lost my voice and would ring at the weekend.
I asked the carer if all demented people were like this, she said that they were but my mother is a particularly bad example.
My mother began the minute I set foot in the door. Complaining, whining, moaning, tearing me off a strip, running me the length of her tongue, grinding on, upbraiding, shouting, telling off, haranguing and arguing even though no one was contradicting her. Everything I had taken for her to eat was wrong except the prepared prawn salads, which I take every time and which I will never eat again ever when she dies. She rakes it around, chews with her mouth open, talks with her mouth full, all the time complaining. Then the carers swapped shifts and she broke off from all this to greet and dismiss them perfectly normally, the new carer walked back into the kitchen and immediately she was back to chewing and complaining simultaneously.
The entire world is wrong and apparently it is all my fault. The only thing she liked was the photograph of the Queen laughing in the background of someone else’s selfie, which I’d cut out of the paper. Every last thing, that I had taken, had said, had done and was, was wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong and bad. GoodGod! this and GoodGod! that, didn’t I know, what was I going to do, why was no one this and GoodGod couldn’t anyone that.
The cat food pouches were the wrong size, Good God how small can you get, for God’s sake what size do manufacturers think they are making, don’t they know what size her cat is and why am I buying them, she won’t pay for them, Good God what am I thinking, has no one any idea how breathless she is and Good God why doesn’t the oxygen work, she’d expected an immediate improvement and there was none Good God why can some stupid person not invent better oxygen Good God have they nothing better to do………….
And so on, ceaselessly. The reason the oxygen isn’t helping is that it goes in her nose and straight out of her open mouth without reaching anywhere near her lungs, of course. Oxygen works of you breathe it in, otherwise not.
Good God how much longer of this? Thank goodness for the carers. For the next two days I shall eat, sleep and watch shopping channels. I may water the garden, I shall not speak to my mother in case it precipitates a heart attack in me. I shall chill. I shall chillax. Time out.
I’ll be fine because I know the carers are caring for her. They were definitely one of my better decisions.
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JaneLaverick.com – having a rest.