Mixed veg with bacon and sweet chilli sauce, with cheesy mash bake

It’s been another long day today, starting with mum’s usual irritating habit of waking me up to tell me she’s going to go back to sleep. At least she made me a cup of coffee first, for which I was very grateful.

The rest of the day was spent on repeat, explained the outcome of yesterday’s hospital appointment and what was going to happen at today’s. Over and over and over again.

At one point mum settled down to watch something on television so I, foolishly hopeful as ever, got my laptop out to do some work on the cookbook. Mum’s laptop radar was as accurate as ever, and she promptly appeared with something she wanted to show me on her phone. She sat down on my bed, and there she stayed.

I told her I was trying to do some work, and she ignored that unsubtle hint. When my responses degenerated to vague “hmm”s, because I was trying to concentrate on putting words together in a coherent order, mum sadly enquired if she’d said something to upset me.

An hour later, having done about ten minutes of actual writing, I gave up. This is why, when mum says she doesn’t need a sitter and is happy to just leave me to work, I don’t believe her.

This afternoon we went back to the hospital, a 30 minute drive, for a 10 minute talk with the consultant. (And I wish I didn’t have a policy of not naming people in this blog, as the consultant has a great surname for someone in a patient-care career and I really wish I could tell you what it is.)¹

Aside from a habit of talking to me rather than to mum, his patient – she has dementia, but she’s perfectly capable of wielding bodily autonomy – he was very nice. The outcome is that mum either has a permanent catheter, to which mum gave a firm NO, or she has to just live with needing to wee more frequently than she would prefer.

Today mum was happy with that outcome, but I have asked the consultant to send a letter explaining what he said so that I can show it to mum when she starts demanding to know why no-one is trying to help her. Knowing that she will do this and having a strategy in place to deal with it is progress of a kind, I suppose. I still wish I didn’t have to, though. 😥

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Dinner was a bit of a mishmash of stuff that needed using: a ready-made cheesy mash bake, accompanied by a bag of mixed veg (carrot ribbons, green beans, mini corn cobs, Tenderstem broccoli) with the last couple of rashers of bacon and a squeeze of sweet chilli sauce. It gained an “mmm” from mum, which is as good as I can expect.

This evening I’m feeling the effects of two days out in a row: my legs feel like marshmallow and I’m scared of taking a tumble, so I will have to remain ignorant of whether it’s snowing yet. I’ll pretend it is.

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1. Sod it: his surname is Jaber. 💉 ↩︎