Just another day in the life
A vignette from yesterday.
At some point during the morning, my 92 year old father’s carer rang from the coast to report an incident.
As per usual, he had taken a cup of tea up to his bedroom at 7.00am in advance of returning a quarter of an hour later in order to get him up for the day and then come down for breakfast.
When he entered, my father was in the en-suite bathroom.
“Are you okay, Charles?”
The reply was in the affirmative.
Fifteen minutes later the carer had returned. Still no sign of my father in the bedroom.
“Are you okay, Charles?”
“Not exactly”.
It turned out that my father had fallen in getting up from the toilet and/or otherwise making his way back to bed and had not been able to right himself. In falling he had suffered a couple of abrasions to his hand.
The ‘getting up’ process had followed and included a shave, shower, getting dressed and attending to the abrasions, which were not serious, by applying antiseptic cream and elastoplasts.
Breakfast then proceeded as normal.
A couple of hours later, the young lady who comes to tidy up and clean the house every Monday arrived.
She’s a chatty sort, sometimes prone to semi-dotty ideas about life and fulfillment, but my father enjoys her company and – if this is the right phrase – she has almost become ‘part of the furniture’ at the house.
Shortly afterwards she had reported to the carer that my father had called out to her in the next room because he had seen a puppet coming out of the fireplace in the snug as he was flicking through the newspapers and watching the BBC TV morning breakfast show.
There was no puppet.
As a precaution, the carer had then rung the local medical clinic and registered that he needed to speak to a GP. The reply had been that the GP had a long list of appointments and the call might take an hour or so. At the point that the carer phoned me, it had not yet been received.
I thanked him for the information and asked to be kept informed.
Closer to lunchtime he rang again.
The GP had duly phoned and the carer had described what had occurred. In response the GP said that if an elderly person had seen a puppet coming out of the fireplace, this was most likely a product of his dementia.
However, if he had heard a puppet coming out of the fireplace then this might possibly be a symptom of concussion suffered during his earlier fall.
An appointment had been duly arranged for 4.00pm in any event.
About 5.15pm the carer rang me again to report that the appointment had gone well and that my father had displayed no other symptoms of possible concussion during the day, which had panned out as per normal.
He and the carer had watched another WW2 documentary via YouTube and to all intents and purposes my father had been acting perfectly normally.
I’m off this afternoon to stay with my father at the coast for the next three days so we’ll see how things go whilst we’re down there.
