Pre-departure excitement
As will become clearer during this post, the process of departure was complicated by Bonnie’s illness, and Paula was understandably distressed by her nearly-nonagenarian mother’s admission to Westmead Hospital only a week before we were due to travel. My mother, trooper that she is, was just distressed that two of her children were overseas at the same time (and I’m not sure I convinced her that Simon would manage to fill the gaps in her week!). So it was that, just as Sacred Heart Day was kicking off at Chevalier College, I received Paula’s call that Bonnie was in A & E after feeling unwell during the night.
My initial response was existential despair, totally unsuited to someone about to act as an Eucharistic Minister to a couple of hundred kids whose irregular experience of Jesus in the sacrament was about to be undermined by my imprecations in the general direction of the Almighty. Good manners and a sensible regard for my mother-in-law prevailed, and I was able to view what transpired over the next 48 hours as high farce.
Paula, good daughter that she is, spent most of the afternoon at Westmead Hospital, where Bonnie had been admitted to what was euphemistically called OPERA: Older Parients, Evaluation, Rehabilitation and Appraisal ward, or something to that effect. It was a closed ward, so you had to be buzzed in and out, something that seemed strange to Paula until it become clear that a significant number of the patients had dementia. Her evening was spent with Bonnie, watching the nurses cope with what degenerated into a circus.
I have this only second hand, mind you, as I was pretending to be useful backstage at the Mission Concert, but the story sounded a pretty graphic! Bonnie was still quite unwell, but getting attention proved difficult. One highlight was a very tall man in a gown and sporting a nappy who had early onset dementia and was quite distressed. He wandered the ward getting in all the wrong places and having to be chased back to his room by the harassed nurses. Paula’s most graphic example was the elderly Chinese gentleman who decided that his wife was stealing his money. Eventual he became so paranoid that he threw her to the floor and attempted to kill her. So OPERA must have been approaching a Wagnerian level — who’d be a nurse?
Amidst all of this, Bonnie and the other elderly lady in the room were in a ward that was pretty much the corridor to a staff room. Pat, as we came to know her, was 90 and suffering from recurring pneumonia, a tiny old lady transferred from her nursing home. Her daughter arrived at the hospital fresh from an overseas trip and spent an hour with her, but Paula was understandably worried about the welfare of both of them when she eventually left, leaving a ward full of shattered nurses and every bed full — except for David, the wanderer, who was still everywhere but where he needed to be.
The next morning, we both went over to see Bonnie — both of us suffering from filial guilt, so we were going to the pictures with my mum that evening, because the week would make it difficult to catch up before we left. Pat was still there, curled up awkwardly, although she had obviously been cared for and given breakfast. Bonnie was a little happier and about to have an assessment from a physio and an OT. The nurses were doing rounds and looking a bit happier; I looked for the Chinese man but they must have had him restrained, while the tall patient was now lapping the ward followed by a tiny Asian-Australian nurses who quietly dissuaded this 190 cm man from getting in the way — “No, David, you mustn’t be in here, David, please go back to your room,” etc.
We both chatted with Bonnie, and with Pat, who was showing an interest in proceedings. There were still not enough nurses so, as she had done the night before, Paula gave her some water and juice. We were getting on famously when Pat started to cough, one of those chest-rattling wheezes that spell pneumonia. She became distressed so Paula went and held her hand and I walked over and put the buzzer in her other hand. She was clearly in serious trouble and turning blue, so I hit the buzzer and when for the nurse. Naturally, she said she would be there is a minute, but when I got back, Pat must have had a heart attack or arrested, and after a short spasm she stopped struggling and collapsed without breathing. Fortunately for her, she had a DNR order and in any case, I was leaving it to the nurses rather than trying out my CPR credentials. Within five minutes, they had pronounced her dead, much to the shock of the nice nurse who had been looking after her. “But she was all right 15 minutes ago” she kept saying; but I remember the advice given to Churchill when he had pneumonia before the Casablanca conference: “Pmeumonia is the old man’s friend, because it carries them off so gently.”
Well, that was a bit sad and a shock, but I thought Pat was probably relieved to be out of it, because her quality of life wasn’t great. So we sat reflectively, and Paula and Bonnie were sad for her, but the good Lord never leaves you wondering. With almost perfect simultaneity (that syntax was just so I could use a noun instead of an adverb), Bonnie’s appraisal team and Pat’s daughter Louise arrived. Louise, who would have been in her early sixties, shot through the ward, avoiding the nurses who had been trying to contact her, took one look at her very-less-than-well looking mother, and screamed for a specialist. She chucked the biggest wobbly imaginable, so I sat her on the end of a bit and tried to talk to her, but when doctor explained that Pat had died, we had a glimpse of the five year old that must have been lurking below the surface of Louise’s psyche all these years. We got 30 minutes of screaming, stamping feet and “I want my mother”; and Paula and I, schooled in a rather more disciplined approach to life and death, could only watch in amazement as Louise was taken away, more demented than any of the ward’s regular clientele, to be calmed by the staff and eventually by her husband. He had the look of a patient man, and suggested, by way of explanation, that Louise was an only child. I could hear Pat saying, while she was on her initial ascent, that even one was a mistake!
Oh well, we all love our mothers. I’ll be glad to get on the plane: it’s a crazy week all round.
