Chicken teriyaki stirfry

Today has, thankfully, been a better day. When she woke up, mum greeted me with “hello, I’ve been asleep”, which is considerably better than her usual listing of her woes.

Around lunchtime, she went for a nap and I took the opportunity to do some emails and phone calls, most of which have disappeared into the black hole of NHS communications. I did at least manage to schedule an appointment with the Pain Clinic, after receiving a letter indicating that I had failed to attend my last appointment without notice. They chose not to acknowledge my point that I phoned them half a dozen times and left two messages, receiving no response to any of them.

Then mum woke up, having turned to human velcro during her nap. She was constantly standing over me or sitting down on my bed, as close to me as she could get. Every now and then she would say “is it OK if I go back in the other room now?”, as if I was pestering her, but never stayed gone for more than a few minutes.

I then made the mistake of telling her that she will see Lady Friday tomorrow, to keep her company while I go out. It was actually meant to be the debut of a new NPC, Lady Tuesday, who will be providing respite care for two hours every Tuesday, but Lady Tuesday is off work so that’s a problem for next week.

And problem it will be, as even the prospect of seeing Lady Friday, who she adores, has sent mum into a panic. The past few hours have been a non-stop loop of interrogation on my activities tomorrow, complaints about how the heat makes normal activity impossible, and “it will be alright, won’t it?”

By 2pm tomorrow, the prospect of spending a couple of hours doing paperwork and hobbling to a charity shop will seem the very epitome of freedom, I suspect.

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For dinner I used a pack of stirfry from Tesco: marinated chicken, chopped veg, and a sachet of sauce. I added a few of my home-grown potatoes, although only a few because many of them turned out to be black in the middle.

Mum thought the sweet stirfry was nice, and even nicer with a load of cream poured over it. This is something she does frequently atm: I don’t pretend to understand it, but it does no harm so she can eat it like that if she wants to. 🤷‍♂️

Now it’s tennis (whatever am I going to do to keep mum occupied when Wimbledon finishes?) and mum’s occasional comments about things she wants to do tomorrow but “oh, I forgot- you won’t be here, will you?” The passive-aggressive is strong tonight: I hate to imagine how it will be when I leave for an entire weekend next month. For me, though, that really will be freedom.