Day Nineteen

My mum is starting to make some baby steps toward progress. We guessed at the outset that this was going to be a long hard journey...I don't especially like being right but I feel it's better to plan for the hard stuff than setting yourself up for disappointment expecting it to be easy. I'd rather fear a difficult recuperation and be right (or pleasantly surprised if it's 'not that bad') than anticipate a speedy recovery and be disheartened.

So...she's starting to spend a bit more time awake and alert; she's doing better enunciating and projecting her voice - more than half the trouble understanding her is how quietly she's been talking, especially difficult in a noisy ward with lots of distractions.

Tonight though we had a little bit of a hiccup. Toward the end of our visit my mum asked if her parents were alright...

As I said in an earlier post my grandad, her dad, was left severely incapacitated from a stroke. He died, aged 91, in 2000 from related causes. Her mum died, aged 95, just a matter of weeks later - also, as it turns out, from a stroke.

My mum cared for them from the outset right to the very end so the fact she'd lost track of those memories came as quite a shock. Not only that, but they died a long time ago - back when my kids were really small so the fact she recognises them as being adults (and me as a middle-aged woman) seems a tad incongruous.

At the same time I'm seeing it as progress - she's thinking more about life outside of her hospital bed, of people and things that are important to her...even if she's getting a bit muddled on the details.

She took the 'news' pretty well. Thankfully it didn't seem like she was going to grieve them over again. However, she is starting to get a tad depressed as the realisation of how ill she's been starts to dawn on her. For two and a half weeks she's been in a weird kind of bubble of existing in a hospital bed and just accepting that's how things are but now she's remembering a life outside of that and feeling frustrated she isn't better yet...there's a lot of hard stuff still to come, I think.