- My mother died at 8:45am today.
She was 87 years 4 months and 29 days old.
She certainly wasn't the easiest person in the world,but she was my mother...and I loved herand I will miss her.
21 February 2008
R.I.P.
18 February 2008
May You Live in Interesting Times
I see that I have now had over 3,000 hits on my Yahoo 360 site since I started it in May 2006.
This period appropriately enough has been 'interesting' so on one level I am pleased that my blog has raised so much interest, but inevitably I am reminded of the ancient Chinese curse
My mother is stuggling in the new nursing home. She has finally realised she is bedbound and is finding it very distressing.
The Jag is OK - except it now has a couple of scratches down one side - somehow garnered while I was out running in the woods around Brussels - but it is trivial... I hesitate to mention it in the likelihood of "Plan F" but it is a thread I've started so I need to finish; so assuming the 'Shaguar' behaves itself there will be no further posts about it.
On the other hand my mother is failing to behave or respond positively to her new surroundings and is therefore likely to be the subject of a lot more angst and potentially more posts - but there is (in all likelihood, soon) a time where I don't think it will be appropriate to post any more here about her sad position.
This period appropriately enough has been 'interesting' so on one level I am pleased that my blog has raised so much interest, but inevitably I am reminded of the ancient Chinese curse
"May you live in interesting times."
My mother is stuggling in the new nursing home. She has finally realised she is bedbound and is finding it very distressing.
The Jag is OK - except it now has a couple of scratches down one side - somehow garnered while I was out running in the woods around Brussels - but it is trivial... I hesitate to mention it in the likelihood of "Plan F" but it is a thread I've started so I need to finish; so assuming the 'Shaguar' behaves itself there will be no further posts about it.
On the other hand my mother is failing to behave or respond positively to her new surroundings and is therefore likely to be the subject of a lot more angst and potentially more posts - but there is (in all likelihood, soon) a time where I don't think it will be appropriate to post any more here about her sad position.
14 February 2008
The Shaguar and the Tough Old Lady are mended
At last! The Jag is fixed and ready for use... I will be going back to Blighty this weekend to collect it and to bring it back to Belgium - this time with insurance.
I didn't get insurance because I thought it was expensive - Eurotunnel quoted £115 for 2 weeks cover and I extrapolated that figure for 3 months cover and decided it was too expensive...
But I'm getting 1 year's cover from The AA for £85 - oh hindsight is always 20-20 vision... I could have saved myself around £1000 if I had known!
On another positive note; my mother will be discharged from hospital to a nursing home tomorrow - at last. It is incredibly complex to get someone out of hospital once they are in there. I don't know how she will take to the regime of the nursing home - but a change is as good as a rest(home)...
I didn't get insurance because I thought it was expensive - Eurotunnel quoted £115 for 2 weeks cover and I extrapolated that figure for 3 months cover and decided it was too expensive...
But I'm getting 1 year's cover from The AA for £85 - oh hindsight is always 20-20 vision... I could have saved myself around £1000 if I had known!
On another positive note; my mother will be discharged from hospital to a nursing home tomorrow - at last. It is incredibly complex to get someone out of hospital once they are in there. I don't know how she will take to the regime of the nursing home - but a change is as good as a rest(home)...
05 February 2008
Nose amputation in progress
I am sad to tell you that my mother is still in hospital.
While she has got over the pneumonia, sepsis, bladder infection and blocked bowel she has deteriorated very badly over the 3 weeks she has been in hospital solely because she has refused to eat almost anything and hardly drinks more than a cup of water a day. On top of that she is refusing all medication and medical examinations.
Just minutes before my car broke down (see the previous post) I had been told that my mother had pulled out all her intravenous drips and screamed the place down in the process. Since then she has been obstructive at best and down right rude and rebellious at worst. Her mind does wander too so I feel sorry for my siblings and nephews and nieces who are visiting her regularly.
She denies that she is trying to kill herself and got quite upset when I told her that she was going to die very soon unless she changed her behaviour. But it didn’t make any difference.
Once again she has rebelled against ‘authority’. She hates being told what to do and when to do it and has therefore started a one-woman crusade against all authority including the doctors and nurses. Her attitude is “I’ll show ’em whose boss around here”, but she doesn’t see that any victory will be very pyrrhic and she will only truly have won when she dies!
Her non cooperation includes refusing almost all food and drink, all medicine, all medical examinations (blood pressure and the like) and also gets very with anyone who tries to encourage her to eat “Oh don’t go on!” is all she will say if you have the temerity to point out that she won’t get any better without food and water.
Last week the hospital decided that my mother wants to die and have withdrawn all but the basic services and are on a policy of “non intervention”. No medicine unless she requests it. Somehow despite all this, fortunately she has beaten the infection, so actually there is nothing medically wrong with her apart from being malnourished and now having a bed sore on her back.
Yesterday the fantastic "seniors home" we managed to not only find but persuade her to go into dropped a bombshell – my mother’s care needs are too great for them to cope with and so she cannot return there on discharge. They aren’t a nursing home, so it is understandable, if incredibly disappointing.
What next? Who knows! I’m right out of ideas right now.
I had plan “A” which was Sunrise, the "seniors home", and plan “B” which was her home which has been done up just in case she didn’t settle in Sunrise, but neither of those two plans work. So now we have to dream up plans “C”, “D” and “E”, but I am worried that we will need plan “F” for funeral soon.
While she has got over the pneumonia, sepsis, bladder infection and blocked bowel she has deteriorated very badly over the 3 weeks she has been in hospital solely because she has refused to eat almost anything and hardly drinks more than a cup of water a day. On top of that she is refusing all medication and medical examinations.
Just minutes before my car broke down (see the previous post) I had been told that my mother had pulled out all her intravenous drips and screamed the place down in the process. Since then she has been obstructive at best and down right rude and rebellious at worst. Her mind does wander too so I feel sorry for my siblings and nephews and nieces who are visiting her regularly.
She denies that she is trying to kill herself and got quite upset when I told her that she was going to die very soon unless she changed her behaviour. But it didn’t make any difference.
Once again she has rebelled against ‘authority’. She hates being told what to do and when to do it and has therefore started a one-woman crusade against all authority including the doctors and nurses. Her attitude is “I’ll show ’em whose boss around here”, but she doesn’t see that any victory will be very pyrrhic and she will only truly have won when she dies!
Her non cooperation includes refusing almost all food and drink, all medicine, all medical examinations (blood pressure and the like) and also gets very with anyone who tries to encourage her to eat “Oh don’t go on!” is all she will say if you have the temerity to point out that she won’t get any better without food and water.
Last week the hospital decided that my mother wants to die and have withdrawn all but the basic services and are on a policy of “non intervention”. No medicine unless she requests it. Somehow despite all this, fortunately she has beaten the infection, so actually there is nothing medically wrong with her apart from being malnourished and now having a bed sore on her back.
Yesterday the fantastic "seniors home" we managed to not only find but persuade her to go into dropped a bombshell – my mother’s care needs are too great for them to cope with and so she cannot return there on discharge. They aren’t a nursing home, so it is understandable, if incredibly disappointing.
What next? Who knows! I’m right out of ideas right now.
I had plan “A” which was Sunrise, the "seniors home", and plan “B” which was her home which has been done up just in case she didn’t settle in Sunrise, but neither of those two plans work. So now we have to dream up plans “C”, “D” and “E”, but I am worried that we will need plan “F” for funeral soon.
Shagged U Are
On top of all the other “little” issues over the last few weeks (and I will get back to my mother's progress in another post) my car has been giving me considerable grief.
It started on Friday 18th January as I was driving to Charleroi to join the BMPH3 for a “Trust Us” Weekend. There I was in my beloved slightly long in the tooth, Shaguar (Jaguar S-Type) in medium traffic in the pouring rain in the fast lane doing about 125kmph when suddenly an alarm message came up “Traction Control Failure” and the engine cut!
I remained remarkably calm considering and got to the hard shoulder without any mishap. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t got the first idea what to do next. I didn’t know where I was, except on a motorway (but which one) somewhere near Charleroi. I phoned my friend Eric who was also driving to Charleroi for the same flight. He somehow managed to find me and a tow truck and managed to get the whole thing sorted and give me a lift to the airport in time for the flight (to Dublin as it turned out).
As we waited on the hard shoulder something very strange happened to the car. The steering wheel seemed to become disconnected from the wheels and could be spun round and round and round! There was no way of steering the car. It made loading the car a little more complicated than usual as I hadn’t stopped with my wheels facing directly forwards, but somehow we managed it. Thank god that the on-board computer spotted the problem and managed to alert me before I lost control. The idea of hurtling along at 75mph without steering makes my blood run cold.
The whole thing was very traumatic for me particularly as I had just had some bad news on the phone minutes before the breakdown about my mother. Nevertheless I did my best to forget my worries about the car and my mother for the weekend and by the time I got back from Dublin on Sunday evening I had a plan…
I hired a car from Hertz at Charleroi airport and that night checked the internet for the nearest Jaguar dealer to the garage that had retrieved my car from the motorway. There turned out to be a dealer in Waterloo, some 20kms from the breakdown garage. I phoned them on Monday morning and they agreed to retrieve the car and pay the €100 recovery fee. That evening I got a call to go and see them to sign some papers and to pay the bill. I was surprised that the recovery fee had mushroomed to €360, but paid up all the same as they had got me out of a hole.
The garage man explained that the man who does the estimates was on holiday so they wouldn’t be able to give me an estimate until tomorrow – in fact it was Thursday I received the bombshell.
On Wednesday a fellow hasher had said “I hope they don’t stiff you with a massive bill – what if it is huge like €2,500?” I laughed thinking that was highly unlikely, so when I got the phone call late on Thursday evening to say that the car needed a new power steering unit and it would cost between €4000 and €5000 (£3000 to £3750) to fix I almost passed out. I told the man I needed time to think and would give him the go/no go on Monday.
I was flummoxed and panicked on Thursday night, but on Friday I got my act together. I phoned my excellent Jag man back in the UK – Stewart at XJ Engineering in, ironically enough, Bentley. He said “They are having a laugh” and gave a rough estimate of around £1000 for the repair. He suggested I phoned the Jaguar dealer in Farnham and ask them for the cost of replacing the Power Steering Rack in my car. They instantly quoted £1208.52 including parts, labour and VAT for the work.
So the people in Waterloo seemed to be using my predicament to their advantage.
I phoned a whole load of people to try to work out what to do next. The AA and Jaguar both couldn’t help me as I wasn’t actually insured with either of them (a big mistake) for the trip abroad, but after a lot of phoning around with both organisations I found helpful knowledgeable people who gave me some idea of my options. I was given the names of two separate companies that they would use to recover the car if I had had insurance with them. I phoned both and got quotes of between £550 and £750 for the repatriation of the car to XJ Engineering in Bentley.
So I could get the car from Waterloo to Bentley and repaired for less than half the cost of having it fixed in Waterloo.
I needed the weekend to think of a plan “B” but nothing came to mind, so on Monday morning I told the garage in Waterloo that I wouldn’t be requiring its services and gave the go-ahead to the cheaper of the two recovery firms. The problem was they don’t take credit cards, so I had to do a bank transfer, and I only managed to get that done on the internet after close of business on Monday and it takes 3 to 4 working days for the money to go through…
Yesterday (Monday) I heard from the recovery company that they had got the money and would be picking up the car sometime this week. So it will get to XJ Engineering sometime next week; over 3 weeks since the breakdown
In the mean time I am racking up a fortune in hire car charges as I need a car to get from central Brussels where I am staying once again out to Louven where I am now working.
Watch this space for further updates…
It started on Friday 18th January as I was driving to Charleroi to join the BMPH3 for a “Trust Us” Weekend. There I was in my beloved slightly long in the tooth, Shaguar (Jaguar S-Type) in medium traffic in the pouring rain in the fast lane doing about 125kmph when suddenly an alarm message came up “Traction Control Failure” and the engine cut!
I remained remarkably calm considering and got to the hard shoulder without any mishap. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t got the first idea what to do next. I didn’t know where I was, except on a motorway (but which one) somewhere near Charleroi. I phoned my friend Eric who was also driving to Charleroi for the same flight. He somehow managed to find me and a tow truck and managed to get the whole thing sorted and give me a lift to the airport in time for the flight (to Dublin as it turned out).
As we waited on the hard shoulder something very strange happened to the car. The steering wheel seemed to become disconnected from the wheels and could be spun round and round and round! There was no way of steering the car. It made loading the car a little more complicated than usual as I hadn’t stopped with my wheels facing directly forwards, but somehow we managed it. Thank god that the on-board computer spotted the problem and managed to alert me before I lost control. The idea of hurtling along at 75mph without steering makes my blood run cold.
The whole thing was very traumatic for me particularly as I had just had some bad news on the phone minutes before the breakdown about my mother. Nevertheless I did my best to forget my worries about the car and my mother for the weekend and by the time I got back from Dublin on Sunday evening I had a plan…
I hired a car from Hertz at Charleroi airport and that night checked the internet for the nearest Jaguar dealer to the garage that had retrieved my car from the motorway. There turned out to be a dealer in Waterloo, some 20kms from the breakdown garage. I phoned them on Monday morning and they agreed to retrieve the car and pay the €100 recovery fee. That evening I got a call to go and see them to sign some papers and to pay the bill. I was surprised that the recovery fee had mushroomed to €360, but paid up all the same as they had got me out of a hole.
The garage man explained that the man who does the estimates was on holiday so they wouldn’t be able to give me an estimate until tomorrow – in fact it was Thursday I received the bombshell.
On Wednesday a fellow hasher had said “I hope they don’t stiff you with a massive bill – what if it is huge like €2,500?” I laughed thinking that was highly unlikely, so when I got the phone call late on Thursday evening to say that the car needed a new power steering unit and it would cost between €4000 and €5000 (£3000 to £3750) to fix I almost passed out. I told the man I needed time to think and would give him the go/no go on Monday.
I was flummoxed and panicked on Thursday night, but on Friday I got my act together. I phoned my excellent Jag man back in the UK – Stewart at XJ Engineering in, ironically enough, Bentley. He said “They are having a laugh” and gave a rough estimate of around £1000 for the repair. He suggested I phoned the Jaguar dealer in Farnham and ask them for the cost of replacing the Power Steering Rack in my car. They instantly quoted £1208.52 including parts, labour and VAT for the work.
So the people in Waterloo seemed to be using my predicament to their advantage.
I phoned a whole load of people to try to work out what to do next. The AA and Jaguar both couldn’t help me as I wasn’t actually insured with either of them (a big mistake) for the trip abroad, but after a lot of phoning around with both organisations I found helpful knowledgeable people who gave me some idea of my options. I was given the names of two separate companies that they would use to recover the car if I had had insurance with them. I phoned both and got quotes of between £550 and £750 for the repatriation of the car to XJ Engineering in Bentley.
So I could get the car from Waterloo to Bentley and repaired for less than half the cost of having it fixed in Waterloo.
I needed the weekend to think of a plan “B” but nothing came to mind, so on Monday morning I told the garage in Waterloo that I wouldn’t be requiring its services and gave the go-ahead to the cheaper of the two recovery firms. The problem was they don’t take credit cards, so I had to do a bank transfer, and I only managed to get that done on the internet after close of business on Monday and it takes 3 to 4 working days for the money to go through…
Yesterday (Monday) I heard from the recovery company that they had got the money and would be picking up the car sometime this week. So it will get to XJ Engineering sometime next week; over 3 weeks since the breakdown
In the mean time I am racking up a fortune in hire car charges as I need a car to get from central Brussels where I am staying once again out to Louven where I am now working.
Watch this space for further updates…
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