Day and Night

6.38AM

Wide awake. Not slept much, though it’s merely stress that’s stopped me, pumping all that Epinephrine into my system and making me hot an restless.

Thus far I’ve only needed to get up once to help my Mum, which, admittedly was difficult. There’s some equipment we probably need to help movement into and out of bed. That will be ordered in the morning.

The odd bit about this is that we had a really great day, despite the best efforts of the hospital. I guess it’s merely an overworked system that breeds neglect that begins to look like wilful but they sent her home undressed, still wearing medical gown and just her coat. They also sent her home in something of a liquid state due to overprescribed laxative. Yes, constipation in the elderly is something that needs to be watched but Jesus Christ…

Another odd bit: the last detail didn’t bother me a bit. That thing they say about love conquering our fears… Five minutes work and I had her cleaned up. Some of the worries I’d had going into this new life were eased immediately. I can do this stuff and it genuinely didn’t bother me. Ten minutes later, we had her in her chair and what followed was even more remarkable.

At first she slept and was very clearly sedated – and I don’t care what drugs they claimed she’d been on. She was zonked. Yet as the night went on, she came around. It was remarkable to see. She ate really well and was laughing and making us laugh with her jokes and stories. She watched Joe Biden’s victory speech and started to tell us about the book she read a few weeks about Jill Biden and her work with inner city kids. Craziest of all, three weeks ago, her eyesight was getting bad. I mean real bad. She couldn’t see even enormous writing on the TV screen. Tonight she suddenly started to read some huge text. We were impressed but not as impressed as when she started to read really small text. She was rattling off everything she could see. We’d been using a reading chart on Youtube and she always failed to read the third line. Tonight she rattled off the top four lines almost perfectly (she only confused a P with an F). It again begins to point to our suspicion that her problem was an infection, as did events after bedtime. Sleep makes the confusion a lot worse but it wears off, which is apparently a very classic symptom of delirium. None of what we’re seeing fits the patterns of dementia, which rarely involves hallucinations and she has had the odd small one of those. I think this story is still about an infection that didn’t get treated properly and the type of infection that’s often missed by even hospital tests… a UTI.

I’m going to see if I can grab a couple of hours. I know I can’t go on like this and will have to find a better routine (or at least something to help me sleep) but I’m not as down as I feared I’d be. The situation isn’t great but we’re still battling three weeks of a hospital stay which is contributing to about 30% of the problems we’re having. She couldn’t go to sleep until she’d figured out that she wasn’t in the hospital and feared sleep because, she said, “I pray to God that I won’t wake up to find myself in that bloody place”.

Leave a Reply

Why Dunciad.com?

It’s a cool domain name and it was available. Yes, I know. Available. Crazy, isn’t it?

Really?

Yes. It also helps that it’s also my favourite satire written by Alexander Pope, one of the most metrically pure English poets who also knew his way around a crude insult or two. If you’ve not read it, you should give it a try.

So this is satire, right?

Can’t deny it. There will be some. But it’s also an experiment in writing and drawing, giving work away for free in order to see how many people are willing to support a writer doing his thing. It’s the weird stuff that I wouldn’t get published elsewhere in this word of diminishing demands and cookie-cutter tastes.