Monday 16th:

A relatively relaxed day for both Andrew & myself, which actually I think we both needed. With so much "normal life" stuff building up at home, I didn't get to the hospital till nearly 12, by which time one of the nurses was having to reassure Andrew that I would be arriving. Establishing question revealed he was 20.

We had a calm couple of hours in the dayroom with CD's and the memory book until 2.30 when a lot of the staff came in to watch a training dvd on incontinence products. They did invite us to stay, but we declined, and went back to the ward.

I have realised that it is not a good idea to give Andrew too much choice. I took around 15 cds to the dayroom and asked him to select one. He took them all out of their sleeves and muddled them up really fast. The task is too hard. Some of them don't have much written on them, and I then had to put them all back in their right places. It is better to just select one, preferably with something on the sleeve that he can follow. He has also been taking the pages out of the "memory book" and muddling them up, or writing things on them that are sometimes in the right place and sometimes not, and sometimes are just snatches of conversation. No sentence is longer than around 3 words. This he does quite swiftly. He has, however corrected my spelling where I had accidentally left an "n" out of a word.

The music session with Kev at 3pm was abandoned due to the arrival of a wheelchair to take him for an MRI scan ( about which I knew nothing). He arrived back an hour later with canula in place to insert the dye but MRI abandoned because he was too restless. They are going to try again tomorrow. It is probably too frightening, but I can hardly go in there with him. Whilst he was at the MRI, I enjoyed Sean's salad, it is really good to have proper food. Tony also turned up while he was in the MRI, and later Chris with guitar but we deemed it not a good idea to play guitar with a canula in.

Something strange has happened to his food/taste memory/sense. Tea consisted of soup & roll, salmon fishcakes & mash, and banana. I turned away for a minute and when I turned back he was dipping the peeled banana first in the soup, and then in the mash and then consuming it quite happily. I really don't know what is going on here, but, if you have been following this you will know it is not the first strange food behaviour, and I will have to investigate further.

He is also eating salad which he shunned before. In fact I think he would eat any food, probably.

Tonight we went through the memory book again, and another cd. Although there is a TV/computer screen available at each bed ( which is being watched by other patients), I don't think this is appropriate for somone who cannot remember very much. If you visit and it is on, please switch it off, and don't give in to requests for it. There is just too much choice, too much information, it is too confusing, a lot of it is information that is not useful. He presses the same buttons over and over again and cannot connect with what is appearing on the screen, or its relevance to where he is now. I am having enough trouble trying to remind him of where we live etc; I would rather keep things easy for the time being, and would prefer a cd or the memory book to be used.

The bed next to him has a new occupant, a rather angry scotsman, who is (worryingly) ambulant and who had a rather heated exchange with his son this afternoon. I am trying to forget this, as I expect the son is.

One of the upsides to this situation is that one needs relatively few jokes ( there are 3 written in the memory book) and that I can remember them better than he can and that they are always funny, because he forgot that he was told it a little while ago. Therefore the "Q. how do you make a duck into a soul singer? A. put it into an oven until its bill withers" could go on for some time...

More food parcels in the porch - thank you Rory and more jogging pants..thank you Jean!

Still don't know when Harefield visit is as he has to be referred by the L&D's cardiologist.

Gill
xx