Interesting story on In your area today
Mam's 2.45am phone call began with the words “Don’t panic love, but…”. It should have been earlier, but Mam Jones didn’t want to wake me up.
She wasn’t calling to let me know the latest news updates, namely that she’s started binge-watching Game of Thrones (which she has), that her dog is ‘now partial to a beef paste sandwich mid-morning’ (which he is), or her bin day has changed (which she can’t get her head around as, well, it’s bins and different collection days and coloured boxes and “it’s not as easy as separating your whites from your darks on a big wash, is it”).
“No, it isn’t,” I would have told her if she’d been bothered to actually wake me up when my father collapsed between two rooms, making it impossible for her to do anything to help apart from thinking of excuses about why not to SOS me.
To understand why she didn’t, let me explain the story of ‘us’ to you.
As a family, we’re apologists. We’re not fuss-makers, complainers, objectors, detractors, trouble-makers or rule-breakers. We’re the kind of people who brag down, not up. If anything, we boast backwards.
When people ask, “How much was that?” you sort of expect others to ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’ at how expensive something is. Not my lot. When we ask, “How much was that?”, what we really want to know is how cheap it was.
We are the kind of people who can’t understand queue jumpers or those who only have time for high flyers and not the salt-of-the-earth bin emptier's of life.
This may explain why Mam Jones waited 45 minutes to call me with the following opening gambit: “Hiya, love. Sorry to wake you. Don’t panic, but your father has fallen.
“I can’t pick him up. He fell between the china cabinet and the bedroom door so it’s really awkward. I called the ambulance who said he could be lying there for six hours and their shift doesn’t start until about 7am. Nice woman on the phone, too. Think I went to school with her cousin Julie.
“Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I can’t move your father. Would you mind coming up because I’m at sixes and sevens and he’s not talking either? I’ve put blankets over him - finally got use out of that bloody horrible one somebody bought me for Christmas that I was going to give to the charity shop - but I don’t know what else to do.
“I don’t think he even heard me trying to tell him who’s who in Game of Thrones. What do you think?”
What did I think? I’ve never moved so fast to get myself in the shower, get my husband Posh Paws up, shove the dog out for a wee, and zoom through the deserted streets to find the saddest sight known to children the world over when you open their front door: Your parents helpless.
I wish I had the words at my disposal to describe what happened in the following hours, days, and, as it turned out, weeks. I’m not sure how you can see the best and the worst of the NHS simultaneously. But I have, and it’s been both humbling and frustrating, with the unexpected hitting me between the eyes. Thanks, Cilla.
What I didn’t expect were corridors lined with distressed and confused people on trolleys waiting to be seen, with ambulance girls and boys in green sitting playing on their phones by the side of their helpless charges, conversations long spent as both entered the powerlessness limbo of the waiting game.
What I didn’t expect was for Dad Jones, now incapable of walking, talking, or holding himself upright, to be plonked in a waiting room in a plastic chair with about 30 others in various states of decay, pain, and frustration - Loose Women blaring out of the telly at Concord levels of bossiness.
What I didn’t expect was to sit beside him and hold him upright with one hand and worry myself sick about what would happen if I needed the loo or a break to find somebody to ask them what the hell was going on.
What I didn’t expect was to be given a cardboard bowl when I finally caught the eye of the least frazzled nurse I could corner after explaining that Dad was feeling sick.
What I didn’t expect was somebody with smiley badges on their uniform to sigh at me and utter, “I am a bit busy at the moment as you can see, so he’ll have to wait” when I gently explained, for the third time, that he really, really, REALLY needed the toilet and lots of support to get there and, of course, I was so, so, so sorry to trouble them.
What I didn’t expect was to listen, just below the drone of the incessant happy hour on the telly, to people threatening to walk out if they weren't seen soon, threatening to ‘deck somebody’ if they had to sit in that room much longer, threatening to tell whoever was in charge to pull their ‘bloody finger out’, and even threatening not to vote next time.
That was alongside the cries, the sighs, the private conversations now being unsuccessfully whispered in public, a discordant symphony of kecking, coughing, spitting, crying, weeing, weeping. And that was just us visitors.
I expected to find dignity. I guess it’s still waiting in a corridor by resus.
Some 13 hours after falling, a bed was finally found for him. According to the fella opposite him on the ward, Dad must know somebody on the inside as he had been waiting 24 hours to be admitted and was plonked in a waiting room which was ‘one up’ from the corridor, his new pal said.
From that point onwards, it was more waiting as we moved into the realms of negotiating social care, catheters, zimmers and other stuff that sounds like a firm of solicitors you have been advised against hiring. You know, cheap but just a bit useless. No frills, just get the job done. A bit like the NHS. I would say it pains me to admit that, but I can’t run the risk of having to ask for a plaster.
With the exception of a few people who didn’t appear to have much time for my pleasantries when I asked for their insight - never rude, as such, just passively aggressively otherwise engaged - everybody he came into contact with was pleasant and professional behind a compulsory face mask. The intricacies of how a hospital ward works were baffling, and I’m curious to understand them better.
This would, I kept telling myself, make mere mortals like me who don’t know one end of a cannula from another feel less impatient with the glacial pace at which things seem to move.
Because knowledge is power, isn’t it? Or at least a bit of insight can make those on wards and those sat helpless next to them feel less so.
There were moments of light amid the gloom, snide asides from my father on the state of the food - “I think I broke two teeth on the toast this morning” - gluttony - “See that fella opposite? He had a pork dinner with apple sauce then asked for a sandwich and apparently, he’s been dying for three years” - to boredom - “This woman in pink came round the other day and asked if she could talk to me. A total stranger she was! Didn’t shut up either and held my hand. After 10 minutes, I pretended to fall asleep and waited for another five just in case she was sitting there staring at me, waiting for round two.”
And I bet he apologised for fake nodding off the next time he saw her, too, as that’s how we roll.
Fast forward 10 days, and he’s back in the house, aka Out Of The System. If I’m being honest with you, I don’t understand how. Not that I’ve mainlined Dr Quinn Medicine Woman and now feel like I’m qualified as a proper diagnostician, the kind of person who thinks taking three paracetamol a day means they know as much as anybody else with a stethoscope and scrubs. You know the type, I’m sure.
But I do have eyes in my head and even short-sighted me wonders how a formerly robust and healthy man can be called fit enough to be discharged when he can’t walk unaided, isn’t eating or drinking properly, and is deemed not strong enough to start radiotherapy for the Big C?
Maybe I should have watched a year’s worth of Nerys Hughes in the District Nurse instead. Perhaps I needed to go back to the pre-Aneuerin Bevan days to comprehend the complexities of care and compassion when people seemed to have b****r all except each other.
So… let me take you back to the story of ‘us’ then, to explain how we, as a family, question authority. And that is with a kind of reverence which may get us into heaven but also shunted out of the hospital early.
If you’re reading this and shouting at me, “I WOULD HAVE TOLD THEM EXACTLY WHERE TO SHOVE THEIR DISCHARGE PAPERS!” or “YOU SHOULD HAVE REFUSED TO LEAVE! DEMANDED TO SEE THE CONSULTANT! DEMANDED HE IS ASSIGNED A SOCIAL WORKER! DEMANDED, DEMANDED, DEMANDED, DE-MAN-DED!” I can assure you of this: I questioned everything.
I queried, I prodded, I sought clarification, and I doubted, all with a respectfulness that seemed to be missing from my fellow worriers who, during visiting times, turned their despair into a bubbling, bilious rage. Yet however desperate things are - and they feel crushingly anaemic at the moment - that behaviour’s just not in my nature.
I console myself with that age-old pleasantry that everybody spouts, something about him being in the best place of all to get well.
No, not on a trolley in a corridor overflow or even a rare-as-hen’s-teeth hospital bed.
