Dr Kristopher Lovell

One week on … from Thursday 16th April – long distance celebrating son’s 40th Birthday; loving the calm of being at home and the rhythm of the day. Knowing how lucky I was to have space and a little savings to get by. Interrupted by phone call. My mother (who I had been persuading NOT to cycle everywhere just in case of an accident) was lying in a gravel patch with a suspected broken hip and wrist … I talked to her calmly and issued instructions to my auntie to get a blanket as shock and cold could be dangerous. We waited for an ambulance.
My mum (87) and her sister (89) live on their own on opposite sides of the road and spend all day and every day back and forth (although less now as they try to isolate) and even in usual times have several long phone calls a day (including whilst watching TV quiz programmes). They settle bills by totally up how much they’ve spent for each other and then pay over the balance one way or the other … usually pence rather than pounds. Dishes and plates go back and forth with meals, cakes, pastries. And it was one of these dishes, and 2 pears, that were going across the road when the fall happened – off the edge of the path (no doubt whilst juggling all these items, two sets of keys, and closing the gate behind her).
So, one week on, it’s been difficult. Emergency operations, loss of blood and anaemia; blood transfusions; bone setting; a DHS (dynamic hip screw); transfer to a Cottage Hospital for rehab – and I can do nothing. Can’t visit – not even worthwhile driving the 150 miles to Somerset to sit in an empty house, leaving my high risk, vulnerable partner in Wales. I am having to arrange the ‘practicals’ – clothes, washing, fruit, crosswords, phone top up, etc. remotely and can’t get a handle on what comes next. Life feels complex and simple, busy and helpless, my status as only child (always a bonus) is now an added level of trickiness. But in all of this, the most important thing is she is coping somehow. The woman who never leaves home for more than a few hours, hates holidays, staying somewhere else, using other people’s toilets, has spent 87 years in a mile radius of her birth place, lives on custard creams, white bread and butter and is super fussy, super clean, and a complete fussy-worry-monster, is being stoic. If she can get by, I guess I can.
The next few weeks worry me – small hospital, care home setting. COVID-19 susceptible. If that doesn’t happen, how do I get her out to her home. Will they test here before she is let out of there. Do I stay or do I go. What self-isolation measures do I need to do, both there and here. For how long. I can’t even think about it sensibly. So, in a weird calm I’m just letting it play out.