Post 411. THIS TIME IT WAS MAUREEN.

TAKEN TO HOSPITAL

AFTER A FALL AT HOME.
There was a bloody great crash, followed by five days in hospital, and now Mo is getting about with a walking frame - very slowly.
I didn't hear the phone ring at seven o'clock in the morning: she did and scrambled out of bed fearing it might be brother-in-law Mike ringing to say that her sole remaining sister, Marg.,who has lately been through a disturbing sequence of health problems, had been admitted to QA Hospital, Portsmouth, again. It wasn't. And, so far as we could later find out, it never was anybody we knew. It was probably just another confounded nuisance call from a former bastion of the British empire. Whatever: she lost her balance trying to struggle into her dressing gown and down she went. Just how she catapulted from the side of the bed to the floor at the foot of it is beyond comprehension, but being beyond comprehension has always been part of her charm.
I got her back to bed, but it became apparent she needed more than an old man's sympathy and breakfast on a tray. She needed treatment in hospital. Two kind and efficient ambulance men duly arrived and took her away. She finished up in a pleasant little side ward at St. Mary's with two other patients. The main ward sister was our next door neighbour when we lived in Newport: it's a small world, the island.

That was on the 10th of this month, so she spent her seventy eighth birthday in a hospital where, thanks to Covid (for want of a better way of putting it), no visitors are allowed access.

With the help of ward sister Heidi and our hospital based granddaughter, Jess, she did get her cakes and chocolates however: so on the day she was probably the most popular patient she could possibly have been with most of the nurses and fellow patients about her. She likes to share.

A fortnight ago yesterday, in the evening, two pleasant ambulance men brought her home by ambulance, wheeled her up the drive, carefully deposited her into her chair in the living room, and left. We were on our own again.

Oh, nice people have been and presented us with convenient seating for the shower and the toilet. Other than that we have been left to our own devices.
So Mo is getting about with a walking frame - very slowly, and I am gradually reawakening the half of my brain that went to sleep way back when 'Mo does that' became the order of the day.
And for the benefit of any macho moron who may mistakenly read this, being a housewife is bloody hard work and requires one helluva load of thought.

Stay safe, kindly non-macho reader.