Pizza and salad

Today started with a phone call letting me know that my therapist is off sick for the fifth week in a row. I feel for her, and for me, as I could really use her support atm.

A few minutes later, my phone rang again, bearing the sad news that my favourite community driver was recently found dead during a police welfare check. I tried to tell mum, who also liked him, but she was too caught up in her own woes and snapped “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. Then, as I quietly shed a few tears in memory of a quietly amusing Yorkshireman, mum called “are you not talking to me today?”

Empathy and human kindness are, as ever, strangers to mum.

The rest of the morning was spent with mum dozing, waking up to loop (“it’s sore, I’m sore, it’s so sore. And [as if breaching a totally new subject] I’m really sore, too”) and follow me around the house only to sigh “can’t I lie down?” as if I had physically dragged her behind me.

Then the nurse arrived, to ve greeted by mum dramatically announcing she was “freezing”, while wearing a vest top and shorts and standing in front of the fan she refuses to allow me to turn off. Thankfully the nurse is familiar with dementia behaviour and wasn’t convinced that I was a cruel jailer leaving my poor mother to freeze!

There isn’t much the nurse can do to help mum until the results of the urine test come back but, after being exposed to mum’s behaviour for ten minutes, and my resulting exasperation, she told me she thinks I’m right to move out.

Then more looping, interspersed with odd bits of paranoia, such as insisting I was lying about having to wait for the test results, and repeatedly asking whether I was leaving her. Only because I physically can’t, tbh, mum.

Just as I was losing all patience, Lady Friday arrived and kept mum distracted for long enough for me to have a brief shower, and then took her out for a drive while I watched a couple of YouTube videos.

Lady Friday noted that mum’s looping and health obsession is getting worse. I told her it meant that mum has fully accepted her, as mum is like that with me all the time. “God, that must be exhausting” she said, and she’s not wrong.

Dinner this evening was a four cheese pizza with spinach (an entire two leaves, unlike the one in the headline photo which is a stock image as I forgot to take a photo of ours) and roasted tomatoes. It would have been better if I hadn’t left it in the oven too long so it was rather too crunchy. Mum did say she liked the taste, though, which is the sort of small victory I need on a day like today.

And so to the end of another weary day. Roll on Thursday and my first flat viewing: soon I’ll be out of here, where I can cry in peace when needed, with no-one taking it as a personal affront.