What goes up…

The previous post put me in mind of the last time the old man went upstairs, so I thought I might relay how that, and he, went down.

Not long after a hospital stay, the council carers seemed to have a handle on things so I went out for the evening to a friend’s. I hadn’t been there long when mum rang and told me to come home, “He’s fallen over.”

Experience has removed the questions “why?” and “how?” from my instinctive vocabulary since: a) the quantum, parallel universe of the elderly mind to that of the younger observer can result in a powerful disconnect that does no one any good — failure to communicate, if you will — also, b) these things take time. Sometimes one must simply, act, accept, move on. This is the Tao of the tail-enders, the octogenarian ‘om’. So home I go.

What confronts me indoors resembles a kind of tableau – you may be familiar with the work of the artist Jeff Wall or the Clevelys end of Blackpool illuminations, you may not — either way, that kind of thing. A graphic set piece, dense with symbols and players.

Dad is sprawled on the landing,  comfortable he says, but somewhat crazed-looking. The man from next door, a gallant figure who, with his wife, provide a neighborly safety net I would not want to work without, is scrubbing blood off the stair carpet.

Tonight’s carer, a stranger to us, as is often the way, is shuffling about near my dad on the phone to her supervisors. “I can’t pick him up and I can’t go upstairs behind him and he just… fell.” she says, somewhat coldly. But I know she is right. If you have to lift a person, you must come in twos.

Mum meanwhile is on the phone to 111, the non-urgent emergency service. She’s pretty deaf, so I take the phone off her. Dad will bleed in a stiff breeze, so I know things likely aren’t quite as bad as they look.

We are on hold. I notice that the bloody stair is the same one our long-dead cat would claw at years ago. My dad had to take her to the vets to be put down and spoke then of his sense of foreseeing his own end approaching as he did so. Now here we are, ish. Same staircase, different demise.

Me and the neighbour get dad to his feet and into his bedroom for what turns out to be the last time. The neighbor goes home, cold-but-correct carer goes on to their next call until it’s just me and the old man and the voice on the phone.

The operator asks questions which I relay to my father. He answers with a series of untruths he think will keep him out of hospital. Sometimes I think he’s lost the plot, but when it comes to it he knows and can still master the game.

Now, you can intercede in this stuff and have an ambulance come (which can be hours sometimes, if they’re not on a blue light) or you can relay the self-effacing fibs that belie the severity of the situation, and spin the wheel at home. I choose the latter. He deserves a break, he seems OK, ish. And I don’t want to wait around anymore than he does. Besides if things get worse, sometimes worse is what you wish for. So we reassure the earthly powers we need no intervention tonight and consign ourselves to forces unknown.

In the morning he feels better, but it will be the last time he comes upstairs, sleeps in his bedroom or takes a shower at home. As I shepherd him down the wooden hill with the morning carer I step over the bloody cat step and wonder when my time will come. It’s a heriditary thing morbidity, in every conceivable sense.