Sick Days

The memories of Nan that really stick in my mind are when I was sick from school. Though we, me and Mum, would see her almost every week for tea and the two of them would spend a couple of slightly uncomfortable hours making polite conversation, the sharpest recollections I have are of those days when I was too ill to go in. I was pretty weak as a child, I probably averaged a good week or two off every year with a collection of colds, flu’s and vague ‘not feeling great’ problems and so there are plenty of occasions to remember.

It would always go the same way. Mum would eventually decide I was too ill to go, she was hard was Mum and needed a lot of convincing that I was really sick, and she would call Nan.

“He’s a bit off” she’d say, “can you take care of him today?”

That was all that was needed. Within twenty minutes we’d be at Nan’s. The two of them had an unspoken, or at least unspoken around me, agreement that unless I was really bad we would go round to Nan’s. The times she came round to look after me at home I can’t remember, because I was really that bad and would spend the time feverish and fitfully sleeping. We’d walk to Nan’s little terraced house which was a well kept house in a reasonable street. Nothing fancy, much like Nan.

Mum wouldn’t stay long as she couldn’t afford to be docked pay for being late to work. She’d briefly let Nan know how I was and anything important (“he’s full of cold Mum, I’ve given him some cough mixture so best not give him any more for now. I’ll see you at 6”) before leaving for work. Nan would see her off and as part of the formalities then tell me all about how her Mum did the same for her with my Mum, how when she was sick she would take care of Mum whilst Nan went off to work. It seemed to be a pattern in our family, being a single parent with your own close, but only geographically.

With that done, we’d get down to getting me better. It never mattered what it was or what I had, Nan would just calmly set about making me feel better. She’d set me laid down on here battered brown settee and cover me with a thick woollen blanket, give me a drink and hand me the TV remote. She would sit by my side and say nothing while whatever illness I had slowly worked itself through. It was her way, just to get on with things with no fuss. She was never ruffled by anything and she always made me feel immediately healthier just because she refused to be dramatic or concerned by anything. Even the times when I was really ill, like when I had an ear infection and weaved the walk to her house, she gave no impression of being worried. Everything would be alright.

She was like that in everything in life. She never worried too much about anything and never needed anyone to worry about her. When Mum died I was a mess, she was like Nan and hadn’t wanted me to know how bad things were in case I’d worry, but that just made it harder when she did go. I didn’t do any of the organising for the funeral. I was devastated and Nan must have been too, but she never let it slip, and despite all that was going on she never seemed rushed. She would hand me cups of tea with unshaken hands and clear dry eyes.

“Drink this love, I’ll go see the Director. He’ll sort us out.”

She never took any credit for getting me through that and if I ever tried to thank her she brushed it away. She was like that as she got into old age. I always worried that moving to London with my firm was abandoning her, but she was so well. Where other people her age were living pill to pill she was as active as ever. She didn’t need me.

It had to happen eventually though. Even when your GP describes you as ‘freakishly healthy’, as she told me once in a rare outburst of pride,  she was still getting weaker and more vulnerable. I got the call at my office on a slow rainy Tuesday. I told my partner I’d be back when I was back and got on a train. I was at her hospital bed three hours later.

She’d fallen taking the bins out and broken her arm and shoulder. I could see the livid bruise spreading out from beneath the flimsy hospital nightgown like an oil spill across her collarbone. Her face was covered in slight scratches and one large stitched cut. A drip had been inserted into her good arm, sealed by loose flapping tape, and a heart rate monitor had been clipped onto her index finger. She was scratching at both and I asked if she needed a nurse to take a look at them. She peered over my shoulder at the nurse attending to a patient opposite her.

“No don’t ask for her” she tried to lean a little closer to me and when she couldn’t she lowered her voice, “she steals away your blood.”

“That just do that for testing Nan, they need to make you better.”

She shook her head and glanced around her.

“No, this is at night. She does the testing during the day aye, but at night she takes more away for herself. I saw her do it to that lady over there and she pocketed it. She’s done it to me too, I know she has. She’s a thief. I won’t let her deal with me.”

 The nurse, who had moved to treat the patient on the bed next to us, half turned around at this with a bemused look.  Nan refused to say anything more about it and fell asleep soon after. In leaving I apologised to the nurse.

“She’s not normally..”

She smiled gently and patted my arm.

It went on like this. Every time I visited there was some new story. She told me about the door that opened in the ceiling in the centre of the room that only the Doctors knew about, she earnestly explained that all the other patients were wax works made to move by clockwork, how the singing window-cleaner who did his work to show tunes would be around later and did it all without ropes by hanging off the window frame. Her eyes would slide off me while she talked and circle around the room without focus. She wandered into and out of any conversations I tried to keep on a conventional path. I asked the blood-thief nurse if this was normal, just the painkillers making her a bit dotty. She shrugged. Everyone was different. Her CAT scan had been clear and she had no brain trauma. It might get better. I should be more worried about her cough that wasn’t getting better.

The nurse was right. The hacking got worse and worse and her breathing got more and more laboured. Eventually they wheeled her out of the ward and took her to intensive care, which turned out to be a one way trip. I stood there at the head of the ward watching two purple clothed porters carefully guide her away. I looked back at the patients remaining on her ward. It was geriatrics and the name, with all the negative connotations that comes with it, was well deserved. Despite the plastic floor and the white painted walls being clean, the room being well arranged and free of clutter, the equipment all looking new and effective, there was a dread sense hanging over the place. The patients in these beds weren’t recovering, they were waiting. The women in the bed opposite Nan hadn’t moved in the two weeks I had been there. The lady next to her mumbled continually under her breathe stopping only to shout at the nurses to give her more medication. The beds either side had rotated patients out every two days or so, replacing unwell looking women with plaster casts or neck supports out for more of the same sometime before I arrived in the morning. I don’t think they had made a miraculous recovery.

It shouldn’t have been like that with Nan. She was too fit and healthy, not a burden or inconvenience to anyone. She was mentally all-there and could have gone on happily in her quiet way until she quietly never woke up one morning. I could have handled that. I could have come and arranged the funeral and sorted her possessions and executed her will in a way I couldn’t for Mum because that would have been right, natural. She wasn’t meant to finish off wasting away and flitting in and out of sensibility. It wasn’t appropriate for her, it wasn’t what she’d have wanted. It wasn’t how I wanted it. I headed back to London directly from the funeral and thought only of the days she sat at my boyhood feet and silently made everything better.