When I’m Sixty-Four…

This week Fandango asks us provocatively:

Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?

Ha, that old chestnut! The favourite career-building interview question that opens up the way for giving some stock smart-ass sound-bite answer that trips off the tongue and tells the prospective employer just how committed you are to meeting their particular needs in the long-term… Well I’m not a career girl, never have been, but when it comes to my personal life maybe I do have long-term plans to think about putting into words?

In five years’ time I definitely see me still living here with my husband, in our lovely little bungalow we bought not quite two and a half years ago. Hopefully we’ll be a lot further along the road in getting both house and garden exactly the way we want it – we’ve done plenty so far, slowly but surely, and have plenty more to do. I find that plans change organically as time passes, imagined ideals are knocked off their perfect pedestals and their more down-to-earth replacements generally turn out to be far more realistic practicalities. And as we like to do the DIY stuff ourselves as far as possible, to date the transformation has not been a quick process, but I’m confident we’ll get there in the end!

In five years’ time I see me still in the pre-retirement stage of my life and still proactively planning for my post-retirement phase – currently I’m on course to receive my UK State Pension at 67, in 2030, so in five years’ time at 64 I’ll still be three years short of that goal. At that point I might still be working part time, health permitting, and I imagine I’ll either have a very crumbly old hip joint or a very shiny new hip joint, depending on the particular level of internal disintegration and current NHS waiting lists. Hopefully my Long Covid symptoms will be a distant memory by then, and surely this God-awful pandemic will have become endemic and managed by annual jabs, much like flu is now?

In five years’ time will I still be blogging? Not sure about that one, I might be, but then again I might not – watch this space, and we’ll find out! 🙂  

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A Place Full of Strangers

I haven’t written about visiting my 85-year-old dad for a while because sadly, due to Covid restrictions coming into force at the hospital for three weeks, I simply wasn’t allowed to visit for the duration.

We kept in touch with the ward by phone, so we knew he was doing fine… but still, it was a difficult time not to be able to see dad in person. He has vascular dementia and doesn’t remember about the Covid pandemic, or understand why ordinarily he is only allowed two designated visitors never mind none at all for weeks on end.

So as soon as hospital visiting recommenced at the end of last week I booked a slot to see dad again, and it was such a relief on that first visit to find that we simply picked up pretty much exactly where we had left off – he seemed to have no recollection of the fact that we hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, he was settled and chatty and he looked well.

I noticed that dad has had his hair cut since I saw him last, and with a puzzled look he brushed his hand over his head and said in surprise – oh yes, so I have! So I asked him who had cut his hair, but all he could offer (with a wry smile) was – I’m buggered if I know!

But as soon as I saw dad this morning I realised he was having a ‘lost’ day – where he finds himself neither easily in the here-and-now, nor happily living in the past, but stuck somewhere in between. He said hello and gave a brief smile as I hugged him and sat down, but he kept looking around, distracted and agitated, seemingly trying to pick up visual and aural clues to work out where he was.

I asked him if he was OK, and with sad eyes he said he was in a place full of strangers where he didn’t recognise anyone… A friendly nurse came in and spoke to him by name, and he was surprised that she knew him – he was so sure he didn’t know her. Poor dad, he was so aware that everyone else seemed to know with confidence where they were, so he concluded he must be the one who is confused.

While I was visiting we called mum at home with my mobile phone, and then afterwards my brother called us with the on-screen video function so both he and dad were able to see each other in real time, but dad really struggled to keep his attention on the screen with so many distractions in the background and soon handed the phone back to me, disappointed he was unable to follow the conversation.

I reassured him that it was still good to be able to see my brother via the phone, and dad agreed but wondered why he hadn’t spoken to his mum and dad for a while – he hoped they were still doing fine? I smiled and quietly admitted I didn’t know – what’s the point of reminding him his parents have been dead for a good 30 years…

Dad often lives in this nightmare psychological no-man’s-land these days, alone and lost in a mental landscape ravaged by dementia, increasingly burdened by his inability to make sense of his surroundings. He tries so hard to make his brain work the way he wants it to. He thinks and he thinks and he thinks; puts in so much effort to try to understand it all but somehow nothing makes sense any more.

It hurts us to see him hurting and struggling so much, but with the best will in the world there’s nothing any of us can do to ease that burden for him. There’s no easy-to-read how-to handbook to help with all of this, no instruction manual for coping with the disintegration of mental capacity caused by dementia. All we can do is be there for him and guide him and continue to love him for a long as we can…  

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Handbook  

Covid and Me, One Year On

In two weeks’ time, on 3rd January 2022, it will be a whole year to the day since I tested positive for Covid. Which means it’s almost a whole year since I last felt properly well in myself. Although I wasn’t badly ill with Covid, as in not hospitalised, to be honest although I am now feeling a million times better than I was in January, a few of my most tenacious Covid symptoms have never fully gone away.

For the first few weeks afterward my initial infection I waited patiently for my symptoms to fade… and then it moved on to being patient for the first few months… and then I realised that like it or not I clearly had Long Covid, and it seemed it was here to stay. At that point I was hopeful that after my first vaccination my symptoms would miraculously completely disappear, but was disappointed to find it made no real difference to how I felt.

The first real glimmer of hope came with a partial return of my sense of taste and smell, which slowly went from zero to… well, not quite zero any more. And although much improved since then, both still come and go from time to time on a hap-hazard blunt instrument continuum of sometimes quite good, sometimes not so much. These days I rarely have nothing at all but sadly it seems I’ve lost any nuances of smell or taste. Whether or not it’s permanent I can’t say, but presumably only time will tell on that score.

Thankfully, though, after my second jab amazingly I felt as though a lead weight had been lifted from me health-wise. My extreme breathlessness improved immensely, and it was such a huge relief to feel so light-chested again, so much better than before. But however much my lung function was improved, two things soon became clear – ‘better’ is a relative term, as like my sense of taste of smell my breathlessness still comes and goes on a whim, and even at its best my breathing is still not back to pre-Covid levels.

Some days I can be reasonably fine, but on others walking any distance at all even on a flat surface can leave me puffing and panting and wheezing like an unfit heavy smoker running a marathon uphill. Other Covid symptoms which have improved over this past year but still remain noticably present are (in order of making their presence known on a daily basis) extreme fatigue and tiredness, dizziness (sometimes even when lying still in bed), and headaches.

I know I’m luckier than many – I caught Covid and survived. But I feel the whole experience has aged me before my time, and it’s one I’m in no hurry to repeat any time soon. I’ve had Covid, and from the timing of my infection it was probably the Delta variant. Since then I’ve had both vaccinations and my booster jab, but still I’m worried about catching it again. So far Omicron seems to be more infectious but less deadly – but again only time will tell.

Honestly, I get breathless even thinking about it…

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Breathless

Limbo…

For the past five years my elderly dad, dealing desperately with the ongoing difficulties of vascular dementia, has experienced an ever-moving mix of three potential states of being – fully aware of existing in the here and now along with the rest of us, stuck happily in some time-warp parallel universe where for him the past is strangely superimposed onto the present, or suspended scarily in an unfathomable limbo…

When dad was first diagnosed with dementia, of course he was mainly present in the present but with the odd random serious lapse of memory that was certainly more than one step beyond common-or-garden forgetfulness. The first real sign of dad’s depth of confusion came a few days after he returned from his brother-in law’s funeral. Dad was chatting to us about people he’d seen there who he hadn’t seen for ages when he suddenly said – I think I’ll give Ian a call to see how he’s doing. We couldn’t get dad to understand that it had been Ian’s funeral he’d been at to see all those people from his past in the first place…

And then dad started doing the occasional odd thing in place of the everyday thing he’d been doing for years. Like when making a cup of tea, dad would have the cup sitting on the counter upside down but not understand why he couldn’t put anything in the cup. Or worse, he melted the plastic bottom of three electric kettles before we finally stopped him trying to do things in the kitchen. On two occasions dad had filled the kettle then sat it on the hob to boil – the acrid smell of melting plastic had brought my mum running. And on the third occasion dad filled the kettle, balanced it on top of the toaster, and switched the toaster on.

Dad’s dementia is the vascular type, brought on by several small strokes, so as well as cognitive difficulties dad also has worsening mobility issues. In the past he has forgotten how to walk when half way across a room, standing precariously, leaning on two walking sticks and unable to move further because he doesn’t know what to do next. He has forgotten where he was in the process of walking to the bathroom, confused and bewildered and agitated because he needed to go to the loo but couldn’t find his way through the family home he’d lived in for 40-odd years. And we soon found that when dad was in a more lucid frame of mind again, he consistently forgot that he had been unable to do these things. When he was lucid he wouldn’t believe that he’d been so incapacitated, in his mind he was still fine which was so frustrating for him.

It was almost more difficult in the early days when dad was far more aware of his surroundings and what was going on in his brain. In a sense it has become easier as the dementia progresses and dad is spending less and less time in the here and now. We get the occasional glimpse of grounded reality but on the whole these days much of dad’s day is spent reliving random memories of his past in real time, often including people and places long gone. Knowing his family history we can join him there, and have perfectly enjoyable conversations that leave dad feeling visibly content. The other day dad was convinced I was his sister Edith, not his daughter Ruth, so we were chatting happily about going to visit an uncle and aunt along the coast. Everyone dad mentioned has been dead for years but his memories are so real they carry him through.

At other times, though, dad seems to lose his visual and experiential link to the past, but at the same time cannot quite reconnect fully with the present. These are the days where dad just looks lost within himself. He’s neither here nor there, stuck in limbo, and you can see the confusion in his eyes, traced on his furrowed brow. His speech loses its clarity, slurring a little, and often the wrong words come out so communication loses its vibrancy and leaves dad feeling even more lost. He says sometimes he hears my voice and knows I am talking to him but cannot quite understand what I’m saying, everything just sounds jumbled in his head. He looks intently into my eyes trying to make sense of everything but then soon he looks away, despondent.

It’s a horrible situation for him to be in but in spite of all of this, on the whole I find dad is still very much dad. Somehow deep down he has retained some of his dry sense of humour, which always fills me with such an overwhelming feeling of warmth and love. I asked him the other day how he had slept the night before, and he said with the merest hint of a wry smile – With my eyes shut! Oh, how many times over my lifetime I’ve heard that same response, and how wonderful to hear it now. I’m not in denial, I do know that dad’s mind is slowly disintegrating, but personally I prefer to focus on what we can still share together rather than on what has been lost between us.

Dementia really focuses me on the importance of spending whatever time I can with dad, while he’s still with us, while he still knows us. So I visit him, and sit with him, and chat with him. I hold his hand, and hug him and let him feel the familial security of the father-daughter bond that has always been so strong between us. We are where we are in life, but he’s still my dad and I love him as much today as I always have done… ❤

Life and What Matters Most

Fandango’s Provocative Question this week asks:

What’s the best thing you’ve got going on in your life at the moment?

It’s a really good question, and it’s really brought me up short. Life may be far from perfect for me at the moment, but I know in the past it’s definitely been a hell of a lot worse. Not only do I still have a lot going for me, but also I need to acknowledge that every cloud has a silver lining.

At grass roots level, the best thing I have going on in life at the moment is life itself. I’m still sitting here, safe and warm in my own home, with lots of people around me to love who love me too. I have food in my belly and clothes on my back and money in the bank and hope for the future.

OK, so I have a few annoying health niggles, but I’m a post-menopausal woman in my late 50s who has had poor health since childhood so perhaps that’s only to be expected. And yes, we have a few quite serious family worries just now, but at least I have loving family members to be worried for.

So there we go – I honestly think without doubt the precious reality of living has to be the best thing in my life at the moment 🙂

Review… Who Knew…?

December is usually the month I review the year that has just passed, a kind of individual, personal retrospective from my own point of view. Not at the end of the month, like many do for the approaching new year, but at the beginning, around the time of my birthday. I like to think a lot about how I’d expected the year to go against how it has actually unfolded, about the good bits and the bad bits and all the bits in between, and start to think about all my nascent hopes and fears for the upcoming next year ahead…

And I have to say in pretty much every aspect of life 2021 has not exactly been the year I had anticipated way back when. After all the global worry and confusion and stop-start lock-downs of the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020 I’d hoped 2021 would be more upbeat, more positive… more post-Covid normal again… But of course who knew that, for me at least, 2020 was only the precursor for the even bigger shit-show that has been 2021.

Positives include my husband celebrating his 60th birthday and my son being able to come to visit us for a week over the summer, which was wonderful – my son lives in the area of Scotland that has had the worst of Covid restrictions applied to its residents throughout this pandemic, so I really appreciated being able to see him in the flesh for the first time in almost a year. Oh yes, and I started a new job at the end of the summer – just a temporary contract covering someone’s maternity leave, but better than nothing…

Negatives include me catching Covid very early in January, not bad enough to be hospitalised but debilitating enough for it to have developed seamlessly into Long Covid, the last dregs of which I’m still not quite clear of, 11 months on. And then I was made redundant in the Spring, worrying enough for anyone but for me in my late 50s and now with Long Covid I worried I might not be able to find another company willing to take me on, although thankfully that particular worry turned out to be fruitless.

Additionally my ongoing slowly-worsening long-term hip pain has recently been diagnosed as osteo-arthritis, which I’m frustratedly coming to terms with while limping along with painfully reduced mobility. Sadly my dad’s dementia has definitely got a lot worse this year, the deterioration in his mental capacity is striking but not surprising, and after a bad fall at home he’s currently in our local hospital and will now have to go into long-term care afterwards rather than return home.

And worst of all my very poorly 8-year-old grandson (who has two long-term health conditions) is also currently in hospital with his mum there to look after him, but this time 100 miles away from the rest of his family and with a very serious surgery looming on the horizon for him early in the new year, so health-wise it’s been a worrying time for our close-knit little family.

I suppose having had my two Covid vaccines plus booster has to count as one of the good things, too? But needing to have them at all is not – and right now with this new Omicron variant spreading like wildfire, what hope is there for Covid being any less of a concern for everyone in 2022?

So I think this year I should maybe just forget about trying to think ahead to next year, and just take it all as it comes, because we’ve got no way of knowing what the world will have in store for us in the future… We are where we are, like it or not, and it will be what it will be…

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: ‘Rev’

Holding On…

When I walked into the hospital ward this afternoon to visit my 85-year-old dad, he looked astonished. ‘How did you know where to find me?’, he asked, before frowning and adding a little forlornly – ‘I’m just baffled, I don’t know where I am…’

Dad has been in hospital for almost four weeks now, and sadly does not seem to be getting any better. If anything, he seems to be deteriorating visibly. His level of confusion gusts and lulls with the wind but his mobility is consistently a lot worse and to cap it all he’s now not eating and drinking properly. This is in spite the best endeavours of all the wonderful staff at the hospital who try so hard to coax him and cajole him to eat and drink and stand up and walk. But dad is having none of it, so today he was put on a saline drip to bring his fluid levels up.

Dad has vascular dementia, the result of several past strokes, and was admitted to hospital at the end of October after a bad fall at home resulting in a bash on the head, which has now healed beautifully. With the help of home carers coming in four times a day and additional weekly respite, my 79-year-old mum has been caring for dad at home over the last five years but it is clear to all of us (except dad) that this arrangement simply cannot continue any longer. Dad needs proper 24-hour nursing care now, and so we are working behind the scenes with dad’s Social Work team to find an appropriate Care Home for him.

And in the meantime dad has better days and worse days, sometimes knowing where he is and others not, sometimes chatty (though confused) and sometimes all too quiet and uncommunicative. When I visited dad this afternoon my mum had already been in earlier in the day, so I knew dad had been up sitting in his chair when she first arrived but was sound asleep safely tucked up in bed when she left. So I asked him – Have you had a wee sleep today? And he answered quite animatedly ‘No I haven’t had the time, I’ve been too busy trying to get my brain to work!’. Poor dad…

And so I continue to visit him for my allotted hour as often as I can, and just be with him. Sometimes he looks sad, or fed-up, or puzzled, or tired, but I just let him be in whatever frame of mind he is in, and sit with it. I sit with him as he sleeps, or talks about things that confuse him, or most recently as he just looks at me, holding his gaze for ages. I too keep eye contact and see him looking deep into my eyes for answers to unasked questions he can’t even begin to fathom, and I know I can’t help him find what he’s looking for.

But I can be there with him and for him and hold his hand and hopefully let my being there bring him some little comfort to his lost word, however momentary. Because I am still his daughter, his first-born, and he is still my lovely dad. Thankfully for now he still knows me and I will always know him. Within me I carry his genes and have inherited his high cheek bones and blue eyes, and amongst other traits his quiet nature, his love of the outdoors, his brick-wall stubbornness and dry sense of humour.

So I sit with him and I treasure every moment because I know I am so lucky still to have him here. He is still very much part of the fabric of my life, however unravelled and frayed and worn his memory threads may be these days. Right now I feel as protective of my dad as I do of my children, as if in his vulnerability I love him even more than I did before. Dementia brings such an urgency to love, a need to make the most of what you have while you have it because you never know when, in the blink of a vacant eye, it will suddenly be gone.

I do realise that one day dad will no longer know me, no longer know any of his family, but until that day comes I’m holding on with all my heart to letting him know quietly and constantly how much he means to us. It’s not much but in the circumstances it’s all I can do, and so I try to do it with as much patience and understanding and comfort and love as I can… ❤

A Lost Cause

‘Where have you been?‘ asked dad when I saw him yesterday…

My 85-year-old dad has been in hospital for the last two weeks, after a fall at home and a bang on the head. Dad has poor mobility due to four strokes over the space of several years, and has vascular dementia. I’ve gone up to the hospital to see him most days, but sadly he doesn’t always remember things. Like where he is or how long he’s been there, or what time it is, or what day, or what year, or what decade for that matter. Or in particular when anyone last visited him.

There are still restrictions and limitations on hospital visiting due to Covid, so there’s nothing straightforward about booking a fixed appointment slot in the ward to ensure that only one visitor per room is in attendance at any one time – and as dad is in a six-bedded room, that means sharing all available individual slots with a potential five other visitors on a first come, first served basis. Additionally, each patient is only allowed two designated visitors for the entirety of their stay – so for my dad, that’s my mum and me.

But of course dad doesn’t really comprehend the intricacies of any of this – not long-term Covid restrictions, not his being in hospital, not his dementia, not why things have to be the way they are for him right now. Dad doesn’t always remember when I visit – I mean, he knows at the time I’m there, but generally he doesn’t retain that information even to the next day. It’s the same when mum is there with him, he doesn’t always remember when she visits, either. Inevitably that hurts, makes it all so much harder to cope with.

I try to remain positive but to be perfectly honest I’m growing weary of constantly juggling work and buses and visiting slots, and I feel guilty that I’m finding it all so stressful. I mean, he’s my dad, and I do want to see him as regularly as I can to make sure he’s OK, but yet… Some days I go up and dad gives me a big smile when he sees me, and that makes it all worthwhile. He is usually happy in the moment, and for dad, the moment is often all he has. But on days like yesterday it feels like a lost cause…

For whatever reason, dad was not in a good place yesterday. Quiet, uncommunicative, not partaking in anything much when it comes to social interaction but easily distracted by watching the comings and goings of staff in the ward. ‘Where have you been?‘ is pretty much all I got from him yesterday, accusatory, as if I was failing him somehow. And perhaps I am. So I just sat patiently with him for my allotted hour, simply keeping him company, trying to engage him in conversation but mostly passing the time in silence, and then I got ready to leave.

‘Where are you going?‘ asked dad as I stood up, and I told him I had to go home now, because my visiting time was up but I’d be back again tomorrow… I gave him a hug as usual and as I turned back to wave at him I saw the confusion in his eyes, the puzzlement, the struggle for him to make sense of it all… So I sat on the bus going home with tears in my eyes, knowing there is no easy answer to any of this, there is no quick fix, no positive prognosis to look forward to… No real hope of salvation.

Dad has vascular dementia, and the harsh reality is he will have good days and bad days but there can be no getting better, only a slow downwards progression towards… what? Who knows… ❤ 😦

Erased

My mum worries that my 85-year-old dad is being completely erased by his vascular dementia, as if he is disappearing before her very eyes.

To be honest, nine times out of ten dad’s short-term memory is shot to pieces, but that only serves to make his long-term memories even more vibrant and real to him. It’s certainly true to say that dad has very little realistic sense of time or place these days, so he may not always be experiencing the same decade or external landscape as the rest of us but as long as you know his life history it’s usually easy enough to orientate ourselves to wherever he is, to make a connection and have a perfectly enjoyable conversation with him. He’s not really lost the plot in life, just the chronology, the timeline, the link to the here and now.

The biggest difficulty of course is in recognising dad’s dementia for what it is it and accepting it. Mum badly wants dad still to be the vibrant young man she fell in love with, the man she married, and sadly is still struggling to accept that he is not that same man and never will be again. She looks for him to be independent and active and all the practical things he was before he had his four strokes and gradually developed dementia. It’s as if she looks at dad and sees only the loss of those things she valued so much in him, and cannot reconcile her growing regret with the reality of his increasing infirmity.  

Understandably this was not what either of them had wanted for their old age. Whatever frailties befall people as you grow older, whatever successive health crises hit you, the expectation is that you will remain ‘you’ at source. Become a bit forgetful perhaps, a little slower and unsteady on your feet, find your eyesight and hearing depleting, or worse, develop a terminal illness that takes you too soon. But in essentials you still expect to feel like you until the end. And you expect the person you love to be the same, to retain the precious memories of the long life you built together, creating a shared past to sustain you both as you ease into retirement and beyond. A diagnosis of dementia cruelly robs you of that possibility forever.

After almost 60 years of marriage my dad still recognises my mum as his wife in the moment but no longer necessarily feels the safety and familiarity of the home they have lived in together for the last 48 years. Sometimes he recognises being comfortable in his own space with his own things around him, but at other times he talks of ‘home’ as being the faraway home of his childhood, and talks of his ‘family’ as being his parents and siblings, all alive to him once more. For mum, at these times it feels almost as if dad has erased her and the children she bore him from his memory, as if we have no importance or relevance in his present, and she feels the inevitable hurt of what she perceives as his unintentional rejection.

Dad is mum’s chosen life partner, but as he regresses further into his past she feels the fear that he is in danger of leaving her behind – or is it beyond – potentially losing all memory of the marital link between them. Meanwhile my brother and I are learning to live with an internally time-travelling dad who occasionally shows us fascinating glimpses of a multitude of pasts, some we recognise as being from our childhood, some from long before we were born. In our late fifties with grown-up children and grandchildren of our own, we are both just so grateful still to have both our parents alive when so many of our contemporaries do not.

So we try our best to help mum look beyond what is so clearly gone on the surface and take comfort in the depths of dad that still exist underneath it all. Yes, we have to acknowledge that dad is no longer independent or active or practically-minded as he once was – but he is still alive and is still incredibly loving and caring and considerate of others. Dad is neither aggressive nor violent in his manner, and although he doesn’t always get the familial connections right he does know who we are, which is wonderful for us and something special we need to make the most of while it lasts. Sadly he’s just a lovely old man who through no fault of his own is slowly retreating into the memories of his past.

Like it or not we are where we are, all of us together, and all we can do is love him and hold him and be grateful that we still have him in our lives… ❤

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Erase

Lost in a Lonely Place…

My 85-year-old dad has vascular dementia, and his particular dementia demon means his mind often plays cruel tricks with his sense of time and place.

In general he still knows who we are, the members of his immediate family, which is lovely for us. But sadly it also means he’s not always ‘with us’ in the here and now, he regularly becomes ‘lost’ in a place that we in our current form don’t exist in. Even at home, in the house he’s lived in for 48 years, he often becomes ‘lost’ in himself. Sometimes nothing looks familiar to him, and he finds himself a foreigner in a strange place. Yet at other times he finds he’s somewhere he knows very well – unfortunately it’s not the same place as the rest of us are in, but it’s very real to him…

Dad is currently in hospital after a bad fall at home, and I knew as soon as I walked on to the ward last night that he was feeling ‘lost’. His brow was slightly furrowed and his eyes were constantly looking around, bewildered. As soon as he saw me he said with some urgency ‘We have to get out of here, we’re in the wrong place’. I asked him where we were and he said ‘We’re in Mary McRae’s house – look around, can’t you see? We need to be next door… the next house’. I asked how we get there, and he gave me clear directions to a house we lived in 50 years ago – and Mary McRae was indeed our neighbour at that time.

When dad first started his internal time-travelling, mum worried that he was perhaps delirious, imagining things, babbling incoherent rubbish. But we soon realised that dad’s brain was taking him to real times and places from his past, and almost superimposing those memories onto the present, like an old film-reel running against whatever real-time surface it meets. In his mind he’s in his childhood home, or completing his National Service, or deeply entrenched in some other precious memory from the past.

Tonight I visited dad in hospital again, and thankfully he was looking a lot more settled, but as soon as he spoke I realised he was still ‘lost’. ‘Did you come by train?’ dad asked me – I told him no, I took the bus up, there is no train. ‘But you got off the same train as Bill Smith’ he insisted. I gently reminded dad that Bill Smith lived in Stonehaven (about 110 miles away), and we hadn’t seen him for about 20 years. Dad looked puzzled – ‘Aren’t we in Stonehaven?’ No, I told him, we’re in Inverness, you’re in hospital after a fall.

Dad remained consistently confused about our current location, and wanted to know how I’d get home, was I going to be staying with Bill Smith and his wife? And where was dad going to be staying tonight, was he going home on the train, did he have to book a hotel, how much would it cost for a night, did mum know where he was and that he wouldn’t be home tonight? I reminded him he would be sleeping in the same hospital bed as he slept in last night, and patted the bed cover next to us to remind him. ‘That’s not my bed’ said dad, ‘I’ve never seen that bed in my life before… Where am I going to sleep tonight?’

And so it goes on. This is always dad’s biggest worry every evening – where he will be sleeping. The nurses on the ward were concerned dad’s growing confusion was because he was in the unfamiliar surroundings of the hospital, but I let them know that sadly this happens most nights at home, too. Dad’s ‘lost’-ness is internal, not based on external location.

There can be no comforting him, no lasting reassurance to be offered. Just variations on a theme of the same repetitive conversation, played out night after night, dad fretting moment by moment about where he’s going to sleep, lost in a lonely place inside his own mind he can never escape from, frustratingly out of reach of reality…

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Trick