Tales from the first year of geriatric wedlock

Life With The Aged Ms 

 In the past few months, we’ve been having problems with the elders. I don’t mean the overgrown trees along the canal path, but our elderly mothers.

We hear this refrain from many people our age, and it’s surprising how often it’s worded like this. We’ve been having problems. Our lives have been disrupted. It’s so difficult for us. And these statements are, of course, entirely true – but they’re not the whole truth, are they? If it’s tough for us, it’s even worse for the elderly relatives themselves. And I have to admit that I’ve managed to sidestep the worst of the life-disruption myself so far, so I’m not complaining.

            My own mother is in her early eighties, though you’d never think it to look at her. She might not have the breath-takingly youthful good looks of Jane Fonda in Frankie & Grace (the result of good genes, an excellent plastic surgeon and a pact with the devil), but she definitely looks young for her age. She is also – like Jane Fonda – keen to not appear to be old. She won’t use a walking stick or a hearing aid, for instance, and she doesn’t like admitting she needs help. So it was no surprise that, when she fell in the garden a few months ago and fractured her ankle, she brought the washing in before she sat down on the settee for a cup of tea and ‘a bit of a rest’…

   

         Anyway, our niece turned up soon afterwards and insisted on taking Mum to A & E, where, several hours later, she lost consciousness and was whisked off to the Resuscitation Room as her blood pressure had dropped very low and they thought she might be having a cardiac event. It turned out it was ‘just’ a faint, but during the night her blood pressure rose very high, but stabilized next day. As they were more concerned about her heart than her leg, she ended up being released several days later with no follow-up appointment for her fractured ankle, no compression socks, no advice at all really. She then stayed at Niece’s house for several weeks.

            Though we did visit her there, and phoned her every day, I must admit that we dodged a bullet that time. I had invited her to stay with us, but unfortunately our spare room is up two flights of stairs. Also, mum would much rather stay in Niece’s four-bedroomed house where there’s a TV in the guestroom and full access to her beloved great-grandson and to Niece’s partner, whom mum adores.

            Weeks later, when she was back at home and her lower leg was still swollen, she did manage to make an appointment to see the orthopedic surgeon for a check-up and P went with her as I was at work. Unfortunately, the doctor was given the wrong set of notes and he began the conversation with the words:

            ‘So, you were drunk when you fell down in the street?’

My mum is a virtual teetotaller who would quite literally rather be mowed down by a car (while wearing clean underwear, of course) than fall down in the street the worse for drink. She was so shocked and confused by the doctor’s words that it was a good job P was there to listen to the doctor and put things right, as she heard no more of the consultation. She had her listening face on but she wasn’t hearing what he said because she too busy worrying that the entire hospital, where she worked for thirty years, now thought she was a lush.

In the car, driving home, she was obviously still worrying about it as she said to P ‘You know I never drink, don’t you?’. P, with his usual pedantic obsession with the literal truth, stupidly said ‘Well, you sometimes have a lager and lime with a meal in a restaurant, don’t you?’, which deeply offended her. Fortunately, he is as oblivious to my mother’s body language as he is to the fact that it is always a good idea to go along with whatever she says, so he didn’t notice he’d offended her.  However, she has told me on several occasions since that she interpreted P’s words as expressing solidarity with the doctor. In mum’s mind, the doctor actually thought she was an alcoholic, whereas in fact he had just got the wrong person’s notes in front of him. The mistake was cleared up swiftly – but not in my mum’s mind. Because when you’re in your eighties, you often just hear key words and fill in the rest based on paranoia. Her poor hearing accounts for about 40%  of our family miscommunication, the rest being accounted for by the fact that we’re all dysfunctional crackpots. Doctors should think about this when they talk to elderly patients.

I spoke to Niece some days after mum had gone back to her own house and asked her how mum’s stay had gone. I won’t repeat her actual words but suffice it to say that both she and her partner were relieved by her departure. Mum goes to bed very early as she likes to watch TV before she goes to sleep. Niece has a timer on the bedroom TV so that it automatically switches off after a couple of hours, by which time Mum is asleep. However, overnight, Mum wakes up frequently for one of her multiple trips to the bathroom and turns the TV back on when she gets back in bed – full-blast, due to her deafness! During her stay, Niece and partner, in the room next door, were woken several times a night, every night, for three weeks by the sound of reality TV programmes blasting out at full volume through the wall. Mum, of course, nodded off during this cacophony and eventually the TV turned itself off, but the whole rigmarole would begin again the next time her bladder demanded attention. Niece and partner felt like the walking dead by the time she went home. Astonishingly, Mum’s eight-year-old great-grandson slept through it all!

So, yes, we definitely dodged the bullet on that one…

One of the problems with visiting either of our mothers is the deafening volume of their TV sets (which, in my mum’s house, is always on – when we ring her, we can’t hear her speak due to the sound of Loose Women or Philip Schofield or Four In A Bed). The blistering heat inside their houses is another thing that makes people keep their visits short (which perhaps is why they keep it so high) – I don’t know about the imminent cost-of-living crisis, but I’m not sure how either woman can afford her heating bills at all. P took his mum for a stroll around the garden one day last week because the temperature had fallen to a pleasant 20 degrees and he felt his mum needed a bit of fresh air, but she went inside after three minutes complaining that it was ‘too cold'. My mum, who has Uriah Heap tendencies, claims that she rarely uses the heating as she just puts a thicker jumper on, but I’ve been to her house in the summer months when it has felt like Lucifer’s workroom. You expect to open the kitchen door onto a vast expanse of Saharan desert sand.

Anyway, mum’s ankle has now mended, and the focus has switched to P’s mum, who is about five years older than mine and resembles the grandma in the original version of The Beverley Hillbillies. I will call her Perdita, which isn’t her actual name but distinguishes her from my mum. Perdita has had a bad year, She spent several days in hospital in January having had severe abdominal pain which turned out to be gallstones. A few weeks later, she was rushed to hospital by ambulance after she complained about chest pains and light-headedness. This time, they fitted a pace-maker which at first completely depressed her. She told P that she couldn’t cope with it as she wouldn’t be able to carry all the equipment round with her. ‘I’ll never be able to leave my chair!’ she cried. It turned out that she thought that the monitors the pacemaker was attached to in the hospital were all part of the ‘stuff’ she’d have to cart round with her at all times!   

The change of scene in the hospital seemed to do her a world of good. She even enjoyed the food, feeling very pleased with herself for eating something ‘foreign’ (an egg mayonnaise sandwich), though it says something about hospital food when, on one occasion, she told P about how lovely the chicken was that she’d had for lunch before the nurse pointed out that it was actually a cheese omelette.

Anyway, a few weeks ago she had to return to hospital so they could conduct a scan of her lower bowel, which involved it being emptied first. Considering her age and general frailty, it was felt she might find this less traumatic in hospital than at home. The plan was that she’d be admitted on Wednesday, have the bowel-emptying prep on Thursday, and the scan on Friday morning, followed by a barium meal scan to check out her upper digestive tract. She would be discharged on Friday evening. However, hospitals being hospitals, the scan was delayed and they decided to keep her in hospital until Monday when they claimed she could have the barium meal scan. When P visited her after work on Monday, however, he was told to take her home. She could have the barium meal scan as an out-patient and they needed the bed, which begs the question of why she was kept in pointlessly for three extra days.

His mum seemed much more confused when he took her home than she had been before she went into hospital. She kept forgetting her address, and getting muddled about who Philip was. This was the Monday of the Great Heat-Wave. Perdita refuses to have her windows open day or night because ‘it lets muck in’, or to have any electrical appliance (such as her electric fan) switched on overnight in case ‘it causes a fire’. She drinks only tea, and will only drink water, grudgingly and occasionally, if it is slightly warmer than room temperature and in very small doses – she won’t have a glass or bottle by the side of the bed in case she knocks it over. So, by Tuesday morning, the hottest day since records began, she was already suffering from dehydration and was badly confused. She kept searching the bedrooms for her mother, who died decades ago, and she was surprised to learn that she had married her now-dead husband ‘in the end’ (?!). She had no idea who P was, which completely freaked him out, though she did suddenly become more lucid, just as he was leaving, and called out that she loved him – as she is an emotionally-repressed Yorkshirewoman, this in itself was pretty freaky!

To make it worse, she fainted on Wednesday morning and P had to phone an ambulance. The paramedics insisted she went to A & E, where she and P sat for six hours. Apparently, an elderly confused woman with possible heart problems and a history of TIAs isn’t considered serious enough to be seen any sooner than this. There was a woman with a broken arm in the waiting room who’d been waiting longer than them and who was still waiting when P was told it would be two more hours before his mum would be seen and he finally decided she couldn’t take any more and took her home untreated. Perdita weighs about five and a half stone wet through and had not eaten since breakfast.

The good news is that she has now returned to how she was before her admission to hospital. The general consensus seems to be that a perfect storm of events (being kept in hospital for three extra days, dehydration caused by the heatwave, the stress of a six-hour wait in A & E without food during which she refused to drink the water as it was ‘too cold’) led to her suffering a temporary blip. She now seems lucid and fully aware of where she is, who she is and who everyone else is. We were very worried that she’d relapse due to the series of visits she’s had to make to the GP surgery and hospital since her discharge – for blood-tests, to have her annual calcium injection, to have the barium meal scan, to have her pacemaker checked out, etc – but she has dealt with these things surprisingly well. She is now back to her normal level of batty, thank goodness, and has even had her tea at our house without incident (she normally refuses to leave her own house). 

She finds our Smart TV confusing (don’t we all?), but she was entertained by an ancient episode of Heartbeat and kept saying to me (as if I am a big fan of the programme, when in fact I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full episode in my life except in her company): ‘He’s a good actor, David, isn’t he?’. Whether David was the name of an actual actor or one of the characters, I have no idea, and I had no way of judging the performance of the man she pointed to as I have no idea how much the actor is like a gormless handyman in real life. I am fairly fluent in Perdita-speak, however, so I understood that she couldn’t watch Miss Marple if it ‘was ‘her I don’t like’ (sorry, Julia McKenzie) and that her outrage against ‘them things they make them wear’ refers to the tight-fitting undergarments worn by female TV presenters on early-evening magazine programmes, which Perdita believes they are forced to wear as part of their contracts so that they look slim under their tight-fitting outer garments. And I learned, for the 5,742^nd time, that she had to stop watching The One Show because of ‘her who is always screeching’ (apologies, Alex Jones).

Yesterday, Perdita was stranded at the top of her stairs when the stair-lift stopped working. She rang our house but P was having lunch with two of his ex-students in Sheffield – the poor man has been visiting his mum several times every day since the week before the school holidays started and had been round to see her that morning, so he deserved a break. It was unfortunate that the stair-lift incident happened when it did. Anyway, by the time he got there, her neighbour had helped her to get off the seat and had managed to twist it a little so it wasn’t blocking access to the staircase. When Philip rang the company who installed the lift, he was told it would cost around £350 for someone to come out to fix it as an emergency, but it turned out that it should have had a pre-paid annual service in March but they had never contacted Perdita about it. When the engineer turned up that evening (about eight o’clock – six hours after the stair-lift got stuck, which doesn’t sound that bad until you realise that Perdita’s house has only one toilet, which is upstairs), having failed to ring P first as he was supposed to, he told Perdita that the problem was a bolt which needed replacing but ‘they couldn’t get the parts’ as the stair-lift was now obsolete. He didn’t charge her anything as he couldn’t fix it, but he told her it would be fine as long as she didn’t swivel the seat round at the top. P of course couldn’t talk to anyone at the company about getting the stairlift serviced because it was the weekend. So we are now trying to convince Perdita that she needs a new stairlift, if only another reconditioned one, but it seems like a futile endeavour.

When I told P about Rishi Sunak’s intention to take money from deprived urban areas and give it to Tunbridge Wells, he said ‘The Tories must be in league with Stannah’.