For the last month my family have been on a roller coaster. In early March, aged parent was admitted to hospital with pneumonia and discharged the next day to convalesce at home. My siblings held the fort for a fortnight. I arrived three-weeks ago thinking I would be nursing a 93-year old man through an acute infection by cooking up hearty soups and tasty casseroles. Within a week his situation deteriorated rapidly, his ankles swelled and his chest began creaking like an old piano – symptoms of chronic heart failure. His GP was a saint and made three house visits, but by the weekend a man who 6 months before had been riding his bicycle could no longer lift himself from the chair. The hospital sent an ambulance and thanks to the oxygen supplement he’s now in happier spirits, but his doctors have a difficult task. For two weeks they have tried to to relieve the excess fluid pressure on his heart without polishing off the kidneys in the process. If they can sail between this medical Scylla and Cherybdis to stabilize his situation, then he will be transferred to a rehabilitation ward to help him regain a measure of independent living. Faced with an uncertain prognosis we have scurried to plan for every possible outcome by interviewing home-care companies, vetting and visiting residential facilities, upgrading the house infrastructure to facilitate home-care. It has been a whirlwind eye-opening induction into the world of elder-care.
Amid this were some moments of respite to be cherished. My sister sent a coffee press to help with my jet-lagged mornings and came up for two days to drive me to Macclesfield hospital via my beloved Bosley Cloud, Wildboarclough, Wincle and Higher Sutton – a route that sooths the spirit by its vaste wild beauty.
My distant cousin, Paul, with whom I share the family tree hobby, drove over from Warrington to give me his great grandmothers invitation to my parents wedding. My school friend Gill, with whom I have shared all the important ups and downs of life, came twice to provide her sage District Nurse advice, solace and friendship. In each case we dined at some lovely ancient Cheshire pub – the Bears Head at Brereton, The Swetty Arms at Swettenham, the Robin Hood at Rainow. Dads neighbors, Sylvia, Harry, Sue and John, and bicycling buddies, Paul and Hamish, called, visited, drove us to and fro, listened and provided important advice, support and freindship.
Having to leave in the middle of all this is an unpleasant corollary of working abroad. Expats set out on our big career adventures to new lands as young people - a quarter of a century later we find ourselves distant from elderly relatives in need of our care and torn as to where to retire when our children and our grandchildren have grown up as citizens of other countries. The Seven-UP documentary, which traces the life path people of my age group, has highlighted this dilemma in the case of one participant, Nick, who grew up on a farm in Yorkshire Dales wanting to study the moon and be an astronaut, and as a legacy of Maggie Thatchers gutting of the British university system, left the UK to make his career as a physicist in Madison, WI.
This situation also crystallizes that my siblings friends and I are now on the downward slope of the Gaussian curve of life. In thinking this over I have decided that there are three essentials to maintaining a long quality of life at home as one ages. First, you need a good son, like Bro, who is always there in times of need. Second, you need to rip out the bathtub and install a wet room - on the ground floor - sooner rather than later, and third, and equally importantly, you need to live within walking (motorized wheelchair) distance of a Cheshire pub. Remarkably Brereton Hall gatehouse fulfills these two latter criteria and has just come on the market. I’m very tempted - and to my American husband - it’s as good as an English castle.
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