Bonus Post - Wednesday 21st Nov - Christmas Sorted

http://www.firebox.com/product/5602/Christmas-Dinner-in-a-Can?via=xmas_home

In view of the current chaos in our household, I am Seriously Tempted to order half a dozen of these cans...

All you do is open them, and 12 minutes later your Christmas Dinner is hot and ready to eat. No cooking, no washing up, no stress...  and only £5.99 each.

(hmm. Might be lacking in the flavour and festivity department though...)

Wednesday 21st November - Where now?

Today I have driven through rain and rain and rain along byways and back roads and lanes.... travelling from the school I teach at On Wednesday afternoons, to the hospital to visit my mother. I don't usually go in the afternoon, midweek, but we were having a meeting with the consultant.

I mithered over how to get to the hospital - google said it's route would take 38 mins, along roads that I had never been along before. The alternative - backtracking until I could join the route I know - would have taken too long. In then end, I followed the google maps route. The roads were empty enough that it was possible for me to snatch quick glances at the printouts of the maps as I went along, and in the end I only missed one turning. Par for the course.

Coming back, it was dark, and I always get hopelessly confused trying to get through the muddled mixture of roundabouts and turnoffs in the main town that I have to somehow traverse. It is complicated by a roundabout with a bus lane right through the middle: an approaching bus with suddenly switch ALL traffic lights abruptly to red (all entrances and exits from the roundabout a traffic-light controlled) while it thunders straight across without any reduction in speed.

I'm always phased by this roundabout, and tonight I exited too early, tried to get back on track and ended up hopelessly entangled in the "Leisure Complex" - a labyrinthine car park serving a mish-mash of cinemas, bowling alleys, fitness centres and restaurants. I extricated myself with great difficulty, and plunged straight into interminable traffic queues on the final stretch of dual carriageway, stretching for miles.




We all crawled along, first merging into one lane, then forced to merge into another lane, and then faced with these two signs...  Luckily, the finale of the Mozart Piano concerto in E flat for two pianos started on Radio 3, and I managed to remain optimistic that the nightmare would end.






So, where now, with my mother? The consultant says she is making good progress, only time will tell, she is medically stable and ready to move to another hospital where they have a special stroke rehab unit - all well and good. It is far too soon to make decisions, frame thoughts, form ideas about what the future may hold. I am worried about whether she will regain movement in her left side - any movement? some movement? or not at all? Her repeated insistence that her left side has always been weak doesn't bode well, unless we manage to galvanise her into making a real effort. If she has always been in the habit of not using her left hand, then it will be so much harder to rebuild the connections. Time. Patience. Hope. Count blessings; speech, swallowing, memories, conversation, ability to read and absorb information. We have been very lucky.  

Saturday 17th November - My middle toes

I've managed to get my music "magazine" - ok - I admit, it's a blog, but I think of it as an online magazine - up, if a day late this week. Here's the link

www.themusicjungle.co.uk 

and I try and post three "articles" every Friday evening.

The inspiration for one of the articles, "How many fingers on each hand?" came from considering what it must be like to deal with the situation when your brain is "disregarding" one side of your body. As happens when you have a stroke.

As a music teacher I see this "disregarding" process happening all the time. The young child sits at he piano, an struggles to move the correct finger. Where, exactly, is the fourth finger of their left hand? They can see it, but cannot "connect" to it. If I touch the finger for them, the connection comes alive, and they can try and play it.

I see this with older beginners too - I'm talking about people who have decided to start learning the piano in their sixties and seventies. They sit there, baffled by their inability to complete the apparently trivial task of interpreting the very, very basic music, and translating the dots on the page into movements of the fingers. They are frustrated by the unexpected difficulty of playing even the simplest tune. It is much worse when it is a tune they know well. I am about to enter the Christmas Carol season, and all the students, of every age, will try and play the carols at "singing speed", long before they can coordinate their fingers.

But, hey, it is a problem that I deal with too; often, when I am learning a new piece, I have to stop and figure out the sequence of movements I have to make with my fingers in order to play the chords or counterpoint that I see on the page. I will have to understand, and then learn the mechanical actions before I can then develop a musical interpretation of the passage.

So it is with my mother. I am filled with joy to hear that the therapists are teaching her how to hold a tumbler with both hands, her "good" hand and her "disregarded" hand. I am so happy to hear that she is now able to drink clear, unthickened water. And I think that I have a glimmer of understanding of the extreme mental effort it takes her to complete a simple action such as conveying a cup to her lips.

If you try and wriggle the middle toes of your left foot, you, too, can experience what it must be like to work on reconnecting a "disregarded" finger, hand, arm, foot, ankle, leg. Yeah. It feels weird.  

Thursday 15th November - time sliding by - hospital food

Oh well. Missed three days! I've failed the National Blog Promotion Month Challenge good and proper now!

The days are concatenating into a confused jumble; I can only sort out what has happened by thinking through who which schools I have visited, day by day, and then trying to add in the missing bits. This morning I discovered that I was sitting all curled up in a corner of the settee in the morning, like one of the cats, staring at the television breakfast news without actually taking in the newsweathertrafficreports...

It's not the juggling of the timetables and schedules that finishes me off - although it is pretty wearing. It's the little last-minute adaptations that crash the system and derail the train of thought.

On Monday's hospital visit was very unsatisfactory - I think we only spent about 10 minutes with my mother, and that was all rather confused and disconnected.

On Tuesday we didn't go; my brother was staying overnight so he went with my father. The news was all right - and all right should be good enough, but it isn't somehow. They had a discussion with the medics, who basically said what we were all expecting - making progress, too soon to know, be patient...

On Wednesday we arrived before supper had been cleared away - my word! Grim doesn't begin to describe it, especially arriving fresh from watching Masterchef on television. Under the cover was a soup plate containing a flattened dollop of pinky-beige puree (chicken casserole?), a flattened dollop of pale green puree (peas?), and a flattened dollop of grey-white puree (potato?). Not surprisingly it was untouched. There was also a mug of vegetable soup, an good colour, but the flavour so delicate as to be undetectable. I know, because I tried it. Ugh. I do appreciate the difficulties of providing interesting, delicious, appetising purees, en masse, to be transported on heated trolleys - but my mother is an excellent cook. She serves up roast lamb, chicken liver pate, sauerkraut with three kinds of pork, potatoes with cream and nutmeg, broad beans in mustard sauce, jugged hare, fresh fish, home-made curry, steak-and-kidney pie, nasi goreng....

Depresssed, I called in at Tescos this afternoon to try and find something better. I bought a couple of sachets of superior baby food to test, and also some soup which I planned to heat, thicken with extra potato and puree, and take with me, still warm, in a flask.

Before I could construct there soup, I heard from my father that she had lasagne for lunch - real food, cut into small pieces - and found it perfectly adequate. Oh Wow! She had the stroke on 30th October, and was nil-by-mouth for the first week. Now, 15 days after it all happened, she is eating real food!

She also looks better and seems so much more alert. She can remember how to operate the tablet that we got for her at Christmas to look at pictures and discuss the work that is happening at the flat (renovating the kitchen and bathroom) with plenty to contribute.

What a great way to finish off the week.

Not sure who gets to eat the baby food...

   

Monday 12th November - On the Road

I've covered about 70 miles today. The weather has been depressing and rainy all day, the roads greasy and wet, but the scenery has been fantastic. I wish I had been able to stop and take pictures.

Part of my route goes through a beech wood. It is a main A road curving sinuously left and right and up and down through the trees. The leaves are now almost all a golden tawny brown, falling in gentle drifts on the passing cars.

We did our usual evening zoom up to the hospital, late enough to have missed the worst of the rush hour. The view is less attractive:

 

 

The streetlights and car lights make confusing patterns. It is easy to get disorientated, navigating along strips of samey roads. Some of the roads are cluttered urban single-carriageways, lined with close-packed shops and houses. Others are featureless dual carriageways slicing through wastelands and industrial estates. The route is punctuation with a random sequence of traffic lights, roundabouts, bus lanes and unexpected changes of direction. 

 

Last night we took two wrong turnings coming home. Today we managed to get it right.

 

My mother was very tired when we visited her this evening. Most of the visiting hour was entirely taken up by - shall we say "domestic personal necessities" - but when these were completed we had a brief opportunity to hear her news. She has been sitting in the chair for several hours - something that is very tiring. She is also able to eat her lunch by herself. She says this is a great improvement, as she can control how much food she eats, and how quickly she eats it. The chocolate custard desert gets a thumbs down - too claggy.

 

There were twelve new cards today, and a couple of letters - she is overwhelmed by everyone's kindness, and spends hours going through them, reading them all with great care and attention and examining the pictures.. 

 

 

Sunday 11th November - Houseguests and Fish

"Houseguests, like fish, begin to stink after three days" I believe this quotation is attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

Opened can of surströmming (wikipedia)

A dear friend arrived from Canada on Friday night, stopping over between Europe and home. He heard at short notice that he would have to come over - could he come and stay the weekend? OF COURSE! He's the sort of guest who doesn't seem to mind letting himself into the house because we are at work, sitting waiting until I finish teaching piano at 6:30pm before I say more than a few words to him, or having to sleep on an air bed in the sitting room. It's okay that my husband had to work all of Saturday morning, that I disappeared off to visit my mother on Saturday afternoon.

For all three of us, the weekend, in spite of the way we were working to tight time-tables and rigid schedules, was a brief oasis of calm in the middle of hectic, fast-paced weeks.

We didn't need to entertain, or plan outings, or go out of our way to make things special. We find eachother's company restful and restoring.

We just seem pick up from where we left off. This time we hadn't seen each other for just over a year, when we went to Canada and spent two weeks staying with him and his wife and family, for their daughter's wedding, and to see where they lived. And they live within a couple of hours of the Niagara Falls! Somewhere that I never expected to see, ever.

I don't think that we started to stink after three days, on that occasion.
And three days for this visit, in spite of the current domestic turmoil, was far too short. But the three days were an unexpected blessing, and he didn't smell of fish either!


Kusaya (くさや^?) is a Japanese style salted-dried fish and fermented fish. It is famous for its malodorousness, and is similar to the pungent fermented Swedish herring called surströmming. (wikipedia)

We will be visiting my mother later this evening. I have made some apple sauce, and a thick, sieved vegetable soup in case she has been turning up her nose at the hospital meals again. Maybe a bit of home cooking will appeal? Who knows.