notesfrombethesda

I’ve been living at the hospital for the last month. On Palm Sunday, Mummy dearest started to hemorrhage from the rectum. The reason: diverticulis, small sacks which develop on the large intestine wall and gobble up a load of bacteria, get inflamed and then sometimes burst causing rectal bleeding. We were in ER for about 10 hours. The gastric specialist decided that keeping her in hospital for a few day would be  [ Read More ]

Mummy dear is taking a number of drugs to prevent another stroke, to help her sleep, and also and most importantly, to control her severe aggression. In the hope of helping carers who look after their aging parents with similar problems, I’ve listed the potential side effects, some of which mummy dear is suffering: Risperidona (Risperdal) – Used for the treatment of schitzoaffective disorders. In mummy dearest case, for a profound  [ Read More ]

Hate is a terrible word. It’s incomprehensible when you believe you may have such irreconcilable feelings towards the woman who gave you life. And the truth is, that this seemingly inexhaustible and at times irrepressible emotion may not be as appalling as you think. If you’re in a similar situation, and have been slowly cultivating repression, anger, frustration, depression and a certain degree of aloneness, then HATE may not actually be what you’re experiencing. Or  [ Read More ]

Silvia has arrived! I couldn’t handle 24/7 caring much longer because it was causing me serious emotional stress. I now have a little time to myself although I’m still “on call” and around.  Silvia comes 3 or 4 times a week – the rest of the time I’m caring. Mumsy continues her decline. We now get woken between 1 and 3 times each night. This new symptom was the straw  [ Read More ]

Silence over the last weeks on this blog is due to more and more severe problems in caring for mummy dearest. It all started one night when she woke with severe chest pains. Quite honestly, the handful of times she’d suffered from these, not as severely, we put down to indigestion, and over a couple of hours they just disappeared. However, mummy has had alternating bouts of dizziness, nausea and  [ Read More ]

We’ve hit a milestone – mummy dearest was 90 last week. From near apathy we transformed the event into a series of heart stopping surprises and celebrations which ran over four days. Mummy was elated with the warmth of her family and friends who queued up to shower her with greetings, telephone calls, skype calls, flowers, and tear jerking tributes. And as the last of the surprise visitors left, she  [ Read More ]

Mummy dear mummy called me “mama” a couple of days ago as I was showering her. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but this is symptomatic of how our relationship is maturing. My earlier post, “He is like a battleship…” relates to this. One out of every ten people over the age of 65 develop some form of dementia, and one of every two over the age of  [ Read More ]

Uncontrollable dribbling. Hunched and bent over. And she can’t walk more than 20 yards without stopping for breath or sitting down. The unfolding of mummy dear mummy’s ageing is like watching the metamorphosis of of a decomposing body. This isn’t bowing to morbidity – it’s crude reality. To a degree, the whole tortuous past, the way I was abused by mummy, the insults and endless criticisms which still continue, have  [ Read More ]

214 over 110. That was mummy dear’s blood pressure reading this morning. As many of you will know, that’s stratospheric blood pressure, in fact it’s in orbit. And as usual at the outset of these mini crises, I think, “Will it be her last trip to the hospital?” And, “Will I be strong enough to ask people to the funeral?” Or, “Will her soul leave her body immediately and be  [ Read More ]

I can describe every centimetre of our Health Care Centre, every nook and cranny of the emergency unit at the hospital. I now have esoteric conversations with the chemist, and I even have a one to one relationship with the local government Health Inspector. Such are our constant comings and goings to specialists and gp’s, and the heart stopping periodic flights to the emergency department. Mummy dear Mummy is now  [ Read More ]

This will come as a surprise to some of you, no surprise to others. Wake up to the reality of media manipulation and understand how news is slanted and fed to us. There are enough independent journalists out there who are risking more than their lives to bring us a new perspective on what IS going on. This isn’t about left or right, it’s not even about RIGHT and Wrong  [ Read More ]