Mum back in the nursing home again

Mum won't leave the nursing home alive. I went up there to see her and tears started to fall when I was turning off into the road that passes by the Epping shopping centre. So many memories. A place I have driven to so many times. So many good memories.

I met mum's GP by accident at the nurse's station on the first floor after I signed in with my name. We talked. He has agreed to using palliative care at this point in time. I told him I had an appointment at the haematologist's to cancel, and he said just to call them. The haemetologist had complained about the hospital sending mum back too early last time they had done so.

Going down the hallway to mum's room I wondered what sight would greet me when I pushed open the door to her room. It is a place I have visited so many, many times in the past. I have left part of myself there due to these visits over the months. It has been 18 months since mum moved here from the Coast.

Inside her room I saw mum in bed wearing a yellow striped pajama top. On the left side of her bed they had put down a pressure mat to call the nurses when she steps on it. Under it was a soft mat. On the right side of her bed there was just a soft mat. The soft mats were blue, the pressure mat grey. She had a blanket over her body and her legs, and a bedcover over her legs. The bed was low to the ground to prevent her getting up unassisted.

I went over to the table and put down the iPad box I was carrying. I took out the iPad and called my brother. I turned the control to show him mum lying on the bed and he looked hard at the picture revealed by the electronics and the software. I closed down the conversation after a little while and put the iPad back on the table, and plugged it in at the power point. I sat down and picked up the Kindle and started to read where I had left off reading last night in bed alone. It was the story of Karl Ove in Bergen, the university town he had gone to when he had left home as a teenager.

I read for mum for about an hour then went over and kissed her. I asked her if she was ok. She had been pushing the covers down with her hands while I was reading from the Kindle and so I asked her if she wanted the bedcover taken off her legs. She said "Yes" quite clearly. You have to listen very carefully because she cannot enunciate whole words now. She is incapable of talking, poor thing.