Sausage roll, chips, and salad

Today was another of the good days, which remind me of how much fun mum can be.

We put up our new heated clothes airer, which turned out to be more complex and time-consuming than I expected. Several times mum sent me to sit down before I fell: it’s unusual for her to notice, tbh, let alone express concern.

I didn’t quite keep to my intention to keep mum off the painkillers – I know it’s the right thing to do, but when mum’s clutching her head and saying “it just hurts so much – are you sure you can’t do anything?”, it’s very hard to stick to my plans. We compromised on one tablet and, after a while, the headache went away and mum didn’t need more.

This evening the headache is back, but mildly enough that mum is determined not to take any tablets.

I have been reading around about dementia, and there is a thing called ‘sun-downing’, where people with dementia get more confused and upset at the end of the day when they’re tired. Mum seems to have the opposite – I’ve termed it ‘sun-upping’ – where mum is far worse in the mornings. I have to steel myself to just ignore much of what mum says when she’s lying in bed in the morning, as I know she won’t necessarily want the same thing later in the day.

For example, yesterday (I think, or maybe the day before: the days all tend to blur into one) she was lying in bed, crying, and told me she wasn’t going to go to her hospital appointment next week and that I should phone them and cancel it. I agreed, having no intention of actually doing so, and a few hours later she was grimly determined to go through with it.

Good thing I didn’t cancel, really.

By this evening I was too weary to bother with any kind of food that couldn’t be cooked on a single baking tray, so we had sausage rolls (Greggs ones, as they sell them frozen in Tesco, and I just love them), chips, and salad. Mum likes sausage rolls, except when she doesn’t: thankfully today was a liking day.

Then we had a phone chat with my BIL, a thoroughly nice man (and I’m not just saying that because he asked me to send him a link so he could read the blog 👋), and shortly we will retreat to our separate rooms. Then tomorrow we’ll do it all again, but for me with the additional knowledge that mum has decided she doesn’t like cheese scones – not even the delicious, giant ones from Graces – so I get to eat the other one as well.

Sometimes there are positives to mum’s ever-changing taste in food. 😋