I journeyed over 200 hundred miles yesterday to hear a common plea from my mum and wife: ‘can you get me out of here’.  It didn’t take me long to consider both situations and  to heed their desperate pleas for help.

Following our usual run to Coombe Park and sharing an ice cream mum was happy to go back to Elm Farm Care Home.  She told me how much she had enjoyed her escape into the outside world for a little over an hour.  As always I told her that her ‘little boy’ would be back soon and resisted the temptation to reassure her once again that I had a woman (wife) to look after me back home.

There wasn’t a great deal of conversation while I was with mum; she doesn’t have a lot to say these days.  I resisted the temptation to give her news of her eldest son.  She wouldn’t have coped well with the news that I’d found him fast asleep in his Nursing Home: comatose in the later stages of Alzheimer’s.

Maureen looked forlorn when I found her in the evening – sitting alone at a dining table in Ashgrove Care Home.  She broke down when she saw me as she thought: ‘I’d abandoned her there for the rest of her life’. It took me half an hour to arrange the second breakout of the day.and bring Maureen home.

As I am writing I’m also trying to deal with Maureen’s reaction to being here: ‘this is not home’ – where she wants to be!   I fully understand that I will continue to pay the price for ‘dumping her in a Care Home’.  However, that is a price worth paying for much-needed respite:  just what the: doctor, Admiral Nurse, social worker, and the Home Treatment Team ordered!’.