Cut to the Quick

25th November 2011 Friday

When my husband and I arrive this afternoon my father is lying on top of the bed. He hasn’t shaved for many days, his hair needs cutting. His teeth are on the bedside table. I can tell immediately he’s different from yesterday. He is confused - he thinks I have been here all the time and he sent someone to look for me. He says he thought it was teatime but they told him it was lunch time.

A lovely carer - a man who has had a catheter himself - helps my father empty his bag and says he’s not drinking enough and if he doesn’t the pipe can get blocked and it’s very painful then. But there doesn’t seem to be a routine in place for checking my father’s liquid intake.

I pour him a plastic glass of ginger beer. He only sips it. I say he has to stop talking so much and drink instead. He laughs but finishes the glass. He drinks two more glasses of blackcurrant juice. We try and work out a chart in his diary for him to tick when he’s had a drink but I don’t think he’ll remember to do it.

My husband cuts my father’s finger nails with clippers - but too close to the quick.

I don’t know how to do this - leave my father in the hands of people who are supposed to care for him. And they are but just not how I would do it. And it’s this that is cutting me to the quick.

Last blog for a while. I will be in Portugal after tomorrow with my dear sisters. Leaving my father in the care of the angels.

Cherished

24th November 2011 Thursday

No great words tonight - feeling emotional and tired.

This afternoon I’m in the middle of reading a poem to my father by Thomas Babington Macaulay called Horatius( “Hold the bridge with me!”) when he starts to cough and says,

‘I want to be sick’.

I can’t find a bowl in the bathroom and the wodge of tissues I hand to him doesn’t do the trick. We ring for a carer. She takes away his shirt and vest and cardigan to the laundry. I take away the arm chair covers. After a long time, when he’s back in his reclining chair he asks me to finish reading the poem which has seventy verses. He says he has known and loved it since he was 14 years old and,

‘It still stirs my blood’.

I suppose the poem is about heroes and saving the day....

Tonight my husband is my hero - he cooks the supper so that I can write emails. He even grills the smoked salmon which I’d never have thought of doing. It tastes particularly good with his pasta and tomato sauce. And I feel especially cherished.

Blood in the Snow

23rd November 2011 Wednesday

Brief moments from today....

I nearly fall asleep on the massage couch of our lovely pussy cat healer, wrapped in perfumes of burning scented oils and the light touch of her very soft hands on my clenched back.

My husband buys me a cup of hot chocolate in an olde worlde cafe. I send it back because it’s luke warm. It comes back piping hot with two marshmallows on the saucer - a sweet apology.

Late afternoon I walk with my father round the grounds of his temporary home. He’s wearing thin jogging bottoms and his coat and pushing a four wheeled trolley in front of him. His cheeks are spotted pink with the cold. It is the first time he has been outside for two weeks.

In the car park of B and Q where we are buying compost I make my husband wrong for criticising another driver. I want to stop doing that - judging him, and then me - even thinking it is like drinking poison.

I don’t feel like cooking tonight - find smoked haddock kedgeree in the freezer and bulk it out with lots of poached veggies - mushrooms and purple sprouting broccoli, green and red tomatoes and a tin of sweetcorn. All slathered with a tahini garlic dressing.

Watch David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet - but I don’t turn away soon enough in the bit where the wolf and the bison start fighting. I keep seeing the blood staining the snow and the white coat of the she wolf who won’t give up.

And later the haze of tear gas hanging over Tahrir square - I wonder how much more dying there will be before the desperate wolves bring down the military bison in Egypt.

Shrinkage

22nd November 2011 Tuesday

We are on time for our six monthly appointment with the consultant neurologist but he thinks we are twenty minutes early so we wait till he comes to find us. A psychology student, a young woman who looks about fourteen, sits in on our session. He asks my husband how things are. My husband itemizes the things he does. He makes them sound fun. When he says it’s harder to recognise faces the neurologist pricks up his ears. It’s an indication that there is a change in the right side of the brain. All my husband’s language loss is related to the left side.

I say there are no personality or behaviour changes that I’ve noticed in my husband -almost as if there isn’t anything wrong except he says things like ‘pick up the beans’ when he means ‘pick the beans’. The neurologist says it can be very slow - the progression of this disease/disability. He doesn’t say it won’t progress at all. Which is what I want him to say.

Afterwards we walk by the river in golden sunshine. My husband watches the clouds while I tell him about seeing my nephew yesterday. I noticed how engaged he is in the world with a wife and new son, how full he is of young-man energy and enthusiasm. And how afraid I am that without the stimulus of work and people and desire in his life my husband’s world will shrink into small domesticity.

But it’s me I’m talking about - the shrinking bit. My husband is fine. I haven’t got an exhibition of wierd and wonderful clay creatures, starting tomorrow, like my out-of-work husband with his diminished vocabulary.

Doctor's Orders

21st November 2011 Monday

My father’s doctor rings me this morning in response to a message I left him about re-arranging a prostate implant appointment. He is really annoyed. He says I don’t need to keep phoning him, he has everything to do with my father under control and I should relax - ( ie. let him get on with it and stop harassing him.)

I feel shocked and told off - ‘‘ticked off,” as my mother would say. I feel ashamed, like a schoolgirl who got too big for my boots. I expect he has picked up that I don’t trust him. But recently I thought we were getting along. I didn’t know he had re-arranged the appointment because he didn’t tell me - or the people at my father’s home. I think he just feels unacknowledged for all the work he’s doing. I find myself in tears as I hoover the carpets and look for our travel insurance policy and weigh out ingredients for the Christmas cake.

I feel nervous driving my husband’s car to visit my father. Mine is in the garage - waiting for a new clutch - I stall at the lights and for a moment I can’t remember how re-start it. At least the car behind me is patient and doesn’t hoot.

My father has had bad night - with an agency carer and a leaking bag. He doesn’t know who to complain to or even if he should. I explain again the hierarchy of carers to him but he can’t remember who is who. After this morning’s conversation with the doctor I resist the temptation to go and sort it out for him. I leave him downstairs for his supper talking to a senior member of staff who says he’ll come and discuss it later. I hope my father remembers that. I drive home in the dark and drizzle, not crying, and only stall the car once.

Christmas cake in the oven now - the warm spiced aroma scenting the whole house. Time for supper - left over risotto - it tastes even better the second day. Especially if you meld it into balls and deep fry it. Which I’m not going to do tonight. But it’s nice to think about for another occasion. Sometimes it keeps me from going mad - thinking about things like risotto balls.

Into the Guilt Gutter

20th November 2011 Sunday

I leave for an impromptu breakfast coffee with a dear friend in town. My husband waves me off. He says he’s envious - makes him think he doesn’t have any friends. Not true but I feel my guilt - abandoning him on a Sunday morning - stabbing me in my gut. But I’m learning to breathe it out, discard it in the guilt gutter - like a piece of litter - as I walk to the car - trusting in a bigger plan - for both of us.

He' s still at the allotment when I get home. I start making lunch. I’m suddenly tired of the relentless march of gorgeous, English, home grown parsnips, carrots, Jerusalem artichokes and squashes marching through my November kitchen. I want Italian. I want the hint of summer but the comfort of winter. Risotto of course. But I must rely on the store cupboard. No porcini mushrooms or celery in the fridge so I make a sofrito from chopped white onions and leeks, garlic and a handful of sundried tomatoes using ladlefuls of the soaking stock to stir into the half packet of Arborio rice in the pan. Thank goodness I had some left from last month’s rice pudding fest.

The sun-dried tomatoes make the risotto look as murky as a muddy Devon lane at dusk. Emerald chopped parsley, parmesan and a slab of butter lift it to the heights of deliciousness and we sit at our kitchen table, loving our Italian Sunday lunch. My guilt dispelled for now.

This time next week I will be in Portugal with my two dear sisters. I'm looking for ways to re-frame it - I'm only leaving my husband for seven days if I look at it through my abandonment glasses. Instead of my opportunity glasses - my love glasses.

Dust and Love

18th November 2011 Friday

Today, helping a dear friend clean and pack up her cottage, where she has lived for twelve years, I’m amazed how sticky dust is. Especially the cobwebby dust behind pictures, and the dust glued to the wooden frames and the filmy dust on the glass. Which you don’t really notice when you are eating your meals and watching the TV and not looking at the pictures on your walls. I’m thinking now how long it’s been since I even whisked a cloth anywhere near a picture or a mirror in our house.

Probably even better to wipe the dust off our light bulbs. In our book about 365 Ways to Save The Planet it says doing this increases the amount of light they give off by 40% to 50% and so provides better lighting for the same cost. Obvious really - I knew about keeping your car headlights clean but didn’t think about light bulbs.

I don’t want to write about dust any more. I’ve just watched a U-tube clip which made me cry and which helped me put all the little niggles and perceived problems of my life into perspective. I pass it on to you - with love.

http://www.leader.co.za/article.aspx?s=43&f=1&a=3090