Since last September we have been going down to Australind to see my Mother almost every week. Initially we stayed a few days at a time and went shopping, to appointments and to visit her friends. We paid bills, I cooked and gardened and sat and chatted. She had carers visiting and a physio to maintain her high level of fitness and a dressing nurse to patch her wounds. She was having mini strokes, often in the garden, falling and tearing the skin on her legs. She wouldn’t wear trousers.
As things became more difficult, her doctor and the wounds nurse suggested she move into a nursing home. She didn’t want to leave her house or her garden. Eventually she agreed to look at some nursing homes and she agreed to ‘try’ one. I washed and labelled and packed her things and several pieces of furniture were taken to her new home. The house was left as it was when she was there, in case she ‘wanted to go back’!
Gradually, Mum began to adapt to the rhythm of the nursing home. She went to the exercise class every morning and really enjoyed it, worked out with the physio once a week, met people she knew and began developing a garden outside her room. She went to a karaoke session and thought it was great fun. With regular meals and medication she seemed to be doing very well. She trained the staff to make her porridge just how she wanted it and they’d make her a salad if she didn’t like any of the options on the menu for other meals.
Mum had always suffered from terrible migraines. She had preventative medications which became more effective over the years, but sometimes nothing worked and she was very ill for a day and fragile for a few more days. She told me one day she’d had a migraine but it was different from the usual ones and she still had a slight headache two days later. I asked her to speak to the nurse who dropped by every day.
Twice that same day she told me the things she’d really enjoyed doing. I was so relieved to think she was settling in. She had been there five weeks. Keen on reading the newspaper every morning and then watching news channels during the day, she was well informed and liked to keep me well informed, too.
Later that same day, a staff member from the nursing home rang me to say Mum had been found unconscious in her room and was being taken to the hospital by ambulance. Mum spoke to me from the ambulance and told me she must have fallen because she was found on the floor. My sister-in-law and brother met her at the hospital and stayed with her through emergency, while she had a MRI scan and then when she was transferred to a room in the hospital. By then she was in a coma. She’d had a massive stroke.
We packed up as quickly as possible and arrived in Bunbury to stay with her. Our son drove down from Kalgoorlie and arrived at 5.30am the next morning. My brother and sister-in-law were there that night and every night and morning, too, along with their girls who came when they could be there. She lingered for eight days. It was sad and difficult but the staff were so kind and they kept her comfortable with an air mattress and medication.
My brother and S-I-L where with us at the nursing home emptying her room when the phone call came to say she’d passed away. They’d told us she go when there was no-one there and that’s what happened. We went to say goodbye. That’s when we were told there would be a Coronial Enquiry as she died as ‘the result of an unwitnessed event in a nursing home resulting in death.’
The autopsy took nearly a week as she had to come to Perth. It was confirmed she’d suffered a massive cerebral infarction. It was all so distressing for everyone. Finally she was laid to rest with my Father, in Bunbury, after a beautiful funeral at her church, attended by over a hundred family and friends. She was 92. We miss her so much.
Maidee 30.09.1931 – 13.03.2024