dementia | M T McGuire Authorholic

A bit of a bum day today. Things have been rather hectic recently – you may have noticed this from the distinct lack of posts but Real Life has thrown me a bit of a curve ball.

As you know, if you read my drivel regularly, my Dad is not too good. He has a heart murmur – actually it’s called something I don’t know how to spell; an atrial affribillation. My Mum, meanwhile has an atrial agitation – seriously I shit you not it is called something along those lines – which sounds like exactly the same thing with a different name. Both are caused by pacemaker cells – the things that make your heart beat. These should give out an electrical impulse all at once causing the muscles around them to contract and your heart to pump. In the cases of both my parents, the pacemaker cells are firing off at different times, causing the muscle to just kind of… jiggle rather than squeeze in a nice neat contraction. This means the blood doesn’t go round the body efficiently.

My Dad is not getting enough blood to the head and is having a lot of short term memory problems. My Mum was his sole carer until recently and her problems have only started up in the last couple of years. They have lots of people round them who love them almost as much as me and bro do but… they’re a long way away.

On Wednesday, I saw them both for lunch and they were on great form, despite the fact that Dad fell over on the lawn. Mum and I got him up and the three of us laughed and joked about it afterwards. He was much more compos than usual, didn’t fall asleep and it was really like a visit to both parents. Kind of a gift.

Thursday morning he fell in the shower. The long and the short of it is that he went to hospital to be checked out, came home and then on Friday evening, had to go back. The daughter of the lovely lady who is officially Mum and Dad’s ‘cleaner’ but is oh so much more than that, had spotted the ambulance and they were both there with Mum and Dad at the time I rang, about to leave. McOther was at a wine dinner somewhere in Cambridge so I couldn’t do anything, anyway, until he got home: E.T.A. half 11.

Lovely lady rang my brother and he went down. This morning when I rang I got the low down. Dad’s blood oxygen is very low but at the same time his heart is racing. This is not a state of affairs that can continue long term. So they may stabilise him, and this may just be another visit to the hospital. Or, it may not. They’ll know more this afternoon so until then, all I can do is wait. So here I sit, preparing the house for dinner as if it’s all going ahead, as if I’m going to be here.

I’ve put the washing away, done the beds, fed McMini his lunch and now I must clean the floors and clear my guff out of the conservatory, where we’re having dinner – or will it be they? I don’t know. It’s the most bizarre disjointed feeling; limbo. Such a normal day and yet, so extraordinary. Preparing to think, to act and possibly even to grieve while, in the meantime, acting; filling my minutes with things to do, so as not to do any thinking. It’s a bit like the time when, as a kid, I wanted to ring my friend in Guildford and forgot the code, I had a bit of a spelling block while looking it up and ended up ringing a woman in Guilford County Armagh. Everything was right and yet… not.

I know that if this one is goodbye, my Dad will want me there. So I have to cue in back up, even though I’m unlikely to need it. I have to make sure I can go, even if the chances are I won’t have to. And so the hours tick by and I wait. Ready but actually, really not ready. Not ready for this at all; though it’s been coming for months and I fear that it might, now, be happening for real.

Between you and me and the gatepost, I feel I’m being a bit of a drama queen. But if I’m not around for the next couple of weeks, you know where I am.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of next door’s cat (Chewie’s Girlfriend, as she’s known to us because Chewie would let her into the garden but no other cats). What on earth she’s seen I don’t know but she’s been staring at that drain for hours.

Well hello everyone. I have been working hard at my blog all week but scheduled stuff all primed and ready to go automatically. I realise I haven’t actually said anything to anyone for ages. So here’s the thing: Few Are Chosen is now Perma Free! Oh yes, and although I’ve done very little about it, a couple of sites seem to have picked it up. Some people have even read it, and bought the second book. Booyacka! Thank you my lovelies!

So that’s the good news. Let’s celebrate with a joke from McMini.

“Mummy, tell me a knock knock joke.”
“OK. Knock knock.”
“I’m not in.”

Which got a guffaw from his Dad… which is more than my jokes ever do.

So why the meh?

Well, I know I’ve been dangerously detached for a while – worry about my folks – but suppose it came to a head last night. I forgot to cook supper. No laughing at the back! Yes, I am that out of it, that disengaged with real life. Seriously, though, how the fuck does a 45 year old adult forget to cook sodding tea? I’m so disconnected from the world around me that I am, frankly, a little bit scared to drive a car. It’s as if time’s stretched out and slowed down. I pull off a roundabout, there’s nothing next to me but by the time I’ve indicated and started to pull into the inside lane there is. I take too long looking in one direction at a junction and when I look back the other I’m riding my bike into the path of an oncoming car, with my boy on the back. My thoughts move slowly, as if they’re struggling through cotton wool. That is… not normal.

Then there’s my writing. K’Barthan 3 and 4 came back from the editor the other day. Like the curate’s egg it was good in parts. He also drew my attention to how dark it was, seriously hideously dark, dystopian misery lit dark. And it occurred to me, as I read it back, that I am not very happy, and lack the stamina to be continually worried long term without… repercussions.This whole disengagement with life would bear that out, of course.

Looking at the text, I could easily spot the bits I wrote in the months after my Brother in Law’s death, or when my Dad was extra sick, even without knowing which ones they were, because those are the bits where my characters really suffer.

In life there is always ambient background worry. I imagine it as a glass – apparently this is the psychologist’s favourite metaphor, I didn’t know that but there we go. Perhaps they use it because it works for most people. So the amount of liquid shit in the glass determines how much extra liquid shit you can take. Unfortunately, with my Dad’s trip to hospital, the ambient worry situation seems to have intensified and the shit is spewing out of the glass and turning the area around it into something more like the Somerset levels… or Datchett.

And while my subconscious is busy going arooogah and calling an all stations alert to pump the brown stinky back into the glass it switches itself off. That’s useful for avoiding any more crappy negative bollocks from spewing into the brain but does effect some essential functions…. like, making supper, remembering to pick up McMini from school, or going to pick him up when someone else is. Yes, believe me, I have phone alerts for everything. They beep when I have to do stuff and when they beep, I do it, before I forget… which takes about 3 seconds.

So there it is. I’ve sort of worked out what’s going on.

I’m a bit down. And I want a holiday from myself.

You may well be wondering why. I have the most lovely McOther and McMini I could hope for, a lovely extended family, top mates… a lot to be happy about. And I do. Let me try and explain.

My Maternal Grandfather, knew exactly when he was going to die, to the point when he said a very final farewell to me on the last occasion we met. Nothing was really said. He took my hand in both of his, looked straight into my face and said, “goodbye darling.” I knew, at once, that he was trying to tell me that this was the last time we would meet. I also knew that he realised I’d understood. Indeed, I’d say it’s the only time in my entire life I’ve ever picked up something subtle like a message without words. He didn’t say goodbye to the others like that but then, he saw them again, which, presumably, is why he said such a final goodbye to me.

My Mum was 80 a few months ago. She told me, gently, that her father didn’t survive to see 81 and I had a horrible feeling that she was telling me she thinks she mightn’t be around for long. And I think this is the root of it all. That my parents are knocking on, and soon they won’t be here. And I want their last years to be happy, and for life to be kind to them, and while I think they are happy, I know they are struggling.

So I suppose I’m just scared. Scared that Mum has the same prescience as my Grandfather had, and missing her in some stupidly weird and bizarre way; mourning her while she’s still here. It’s probably quite common and it seems to be a perfectly logical coping mechanism, if a trifle inconvenient right now. Or maybe I’m just sad. Sad that a lot of the person I knew as my Dad has gone, sad at how hard that must be for Mum, sad that I can’t help.

I suppose Dad’s recent trip to hospital brought that into sharper focus. Along with the fact that I’m in my 40s and it seems that every time I catch up with someone I’ve not seen for a while, they tell me they have cancer. The Grim Reaper seems to be terribly busy in my life right now which gives everything, even the happy bits, a rather crepuscular tone. Not my cup of tea. I’m fed up with squinting through the murk.

In some ways it’s a good thing. It makes me constantly evaluate what I have and appreciate it. But it also makes me aware at how easily it could all go wrong. It’s a bit like standing at the entrance to a long dark tunnel and being too frightened to go in, even though you know you’ll come out the other side. Or maybe it’s like being in the middle of a field waiting for a thunderstorm in which I will run a high chance of being struck by lightening. I don’t want to live this bit. I want to fast forward to the other side when I’ve finished the books and whatever will be has… well… been. But that’s not an option on the path of life. I have always believed in living the moment, but I’m doing so with a ferocity that’s slightly worrying. And for the first time in some years, I don’t want to look forwards. I don’t want to see it. I just want to keep my head down, or occasionally glance sideways, and put one foot in front of an other, creep slowly onwards until it’s done.

Having always believed that, if you pay too much attention to the pebbles on the path of life you’ve only yourself to blame if you end up walking into a tree, I’m beginning to understand how people end up obsessed with the pebbles. Because sometimes, looking at the big stuff is a bit much. So they bite off little pebble sized chunks, and then when things calm down again, they are stuck in the habit.

And what does this have to do with writing? Well, nothing much really, other than that as somebody who has all this other stuff going on, I find I write at the speed glaciers move. And like life, when the future gets scary, I just plod on putting one word next to another, day after day, until it gets easier again.

There is something else I’ve discovered, too, about jokes. I don’t actually work the jokes in. My technique with comedy has always been to be myself and when people laugh, pretend it was deliberate. I’ve no idea what makes people laugh or not, just that they do. Except that now I seem to be exorcising the darkness in my writing, keeping the glass of shit half full and draining my crap flooded mind by spewing it onto the page. And it’s changed.

It’s not so hard to go back and lighten it, in fact, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s yet another delay, it would be very diverting entertainment. It’s interesting that suddenly, I need to, though. I hope this new Poe style me doesn’t last too long, but if it does, I have a project I can spew it into… I think… although I won’t be able to call it Space Dustmen.

So there we go. K’Barthan 3 and 4 will not be out in April the way I said, more like June or July… and if there’s any more grief it may be some years.

If you want to read something to cheer you up after that terrible bout of moaning, Few Are Chosen, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 1 is a lot funnier than this post. AND it’s now absolutely free, everywhere. Here’s where you can go get it.