The day after the visit I am, as always, so tired. I’m also rather migrainous at present, so I don’t sleep well, it makes it worse. I am, however, not at my mother’s, so no matter what is wrong, the world is still a better place.
Yesterday our visit was timed to coincide with the first regular home visit of the doctor which I had arranged. I do not like calling the doctor out unless the patient says she is terminal and the carers think so too. For the last couple of years we have taken routine visits to the geriatric clinic at the hospital for the very good reason that the OH can drive the car right up to the door of the clinic; it being subsequently about ten steps for the patient to stagger, aided, to the nearest chair in the waiting room. The hospital geriatric specialist doctor has been absolutely wonderful with my mother; how anyone can find joy and job satisfaction in dealing with the cantankerous elderly, especially when all the patients are going to die, escapes me entirely but the doc was brilliant and had my mother eating out of her hand. My mother swears she has always known the doctor though she doesn’t know where from, she probably went to school with her. As the hospital doctor is at least forty years younger than the patient, this seems unlikely, though I have noticed that my mother will say this of anyone she has met in a professional role since she has been ill. I wouldn’t call it an accolade though it probably is the nearest my mother gets to approval of anyone or anything. Similarly she thinks she has known the second in command from the care agency for many years. The manageress she would just like to adopt (and I’m willing to step down to make room if necessary, just draw up the papers and show me where to sign.)
So, whilst the hospital clinic has been a successful source of regular check-ups since my mother was diagnosed with dementia, I considered it time to change for a couple of reasons. The first is simply to do with age. My mother is 89, on oxygen, with aortic stenosis and left ventricular failure and highly inactive in a permanently heated house, taking her out into the December air in the Northern hemisphere is a bad idea, simply because the shock of cold air in the lungs could precipitate a heart attack.
The second reason is to do with her demeanour. Almost anything can set her off in an attack of aggression which I surmise could prove distressing to other attendees at a geriatric clinic. The attacks increasingly feature shouting and bad language. They are a feature of most of the dementias in an advanced stage and really can sound like insanity made manifest on a bad day. As the treatments are really a damage limitation exercise, I think consideration of the feelings of other patients qualifies.
I telephoned the hospital doctor’s secretary to tell her and pass on a message of thanks and the GP’s office to book an appointment. Wednesday is the day the doc does home visits for all the housebound and elderly patients. He arrived at half past one as we were finishing lunch, so my mother was installed in her chair, I sat far away by the door and he asked her how she was.
Red rag to a bull, he got the lot, both barrels, a solid ten minutes of complaint without a pause to draw breath. Poor man. During the litany of misery that filled the next twenty minutes he managed to take her pulse, listen to her heart, take her blood pressure (which was lower than his, unsurprisingly) and look at her ankles. About twelve minutes in she said she couldn’t possibly go on any longer, her would have to give her something, to which he replies he couldn’t do that, whereupon she launched into a diatribe about the difficulty of having three carers a day and all the exhausting talking. I pointed out that all she had to do was to tell them to sit in their own room if she needed some quiet. Instantly she changed tack to complain how easy death had been for my father and then embarked on a catalogue of untruths about how astonished she had been to find he had donated his body (it was her idea, he didn’t want to, she forced him) and how if the doctor finished her off quickly she would be able to do the same. Then she got into the horror of breathing and while she was in full flow the doctor asked me if she had had any more falls, to which I replied no, largely due to the vigilance of the carers who were very good at magically appearing as my mother made to rise from her chair. I did manage to prompt her to tell him that she had been poorly at the weekend, he said that the doctor who had been summoned had found nothing at all. My mother immediately started another five minutes of woe is her but as she stopped to draw breath the doctor quickly advised her to fill her day with things of interest and to enjoy her lovely surroundings. ‘Can you not,’ he enquired, gesturing at the lovely room provided by my father and the garden in full flower in December provided by me, ‘enjoy this and take pleasure in all you have?’ To which she replied that no one could do that who was 89 and dizzy all the time and dying for at least the last eleven months. Whereupon he made good his escape.
Upon his departure my mother insisted that we had to go upstairs immediately, she had something dreadful to show me. She stomped off upstairs without her stick at a rate of knots and upstairs pointed at the bed. What did I think of that! I wasn’t sure (I was really, I thought it was a bed) but she quickly enlightened me as to the horrible way the evil carers had made it with her shoulders sticking out in the winter so she would die of the cold. So I remade the bed all wrong. If the blankets were that far up she would cook. So I started tucking it in again but she leapt up, grabbed a side and wrenched the blankets around while shouting until she had it the way she wanted it. Everything was disgraceful and the care agency was a total shower! Then she sat down in a rush and made me feel her forehead which was wet with sweat (or warmish) and her 89! She was going to kick the carers into next week, she was, she would show them!
After which, upon my enquiry if the bed was good enough and being told it would have to do she rushed off downstairs and demanded fresh water because she was very very old and very very ill and where were her slippers Good God and where was the cake though she was too ill to have some and would just have to watch other people eat it.
So do you think my mother enjoyed being told by her GP to get a grip and count her blessings, or not?
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JaneLaverick.com – glad to be alive