Peter's Hospital Diary

We have returned from our holiday (a day early) after what has been a pretty tiring and emotional week.

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this on the blog, but earlier this year (just after I came out of hospital) my father-in-law was diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer. It was a stressful time for us all, and although the prognosis was inevitable, the time scales were not certain, and things seemed to be going well throughout the summer. However in August things started going downhill, and last week he was taken into a hospice, for what we thought would be some respite care. In the event, he took another turn for the worse, and on Monday, just before we were due to take Kt to University and then go on holiday, we received a call suggesting that we should go and see him.

We did, and in fact the whole family gathered to effectively say our final farewells, before leaving to drive back home. The following morning we had a call to say that he had died peacefully in the small hours of that morning.

We still had to take Kt to Bournemouth, and then make a decision about our break. We took some of the overflow of Kt’s stuff with us, and saw her settled in, then came home to sort a few things out before setting off to our timeshare in Cornwall.

However, although the weather was fine for the drive down, the following day was wet, there was a lot going on at home, and so yesterday we decided to return home – our hearts weren’t into relaxing in a strange place.

This has been a pretty grim week for all the family, obviously, and it has prompted some darker negative thoughts in me, not helped by the fact that my lymph nodes are still making speech a bit tricky, and I think I also have a bit of a cold which gave me a sore throat and a bit of a cough (which has now eased – thankfully!)

Ironically, the course I was teaching last weekend was on listening, and bereavement, but sadly knowing the theory, while making one aware of the stages of grief, doesn’t make the dealing of it for one’s family or self any easier.

All I can say is that it is nice to be back home, even if it is raining…

However… there is always something round the corner, and while we are dealing with the death of my F-i-L, I am indebted to a friend of longstanding (from when I was a teenager) who I shall identify only as L. L is a director of research at a major teaching hospital, and has been doing some research for me. It is not appropriate for me to go into details at this stage, but there are some leads to follow up. I am also indebted to another friend, Mike, who works for the local NHS trust, who has come up with some other leads to follow, and I am doing that at the moment.

So while I have had some dark moments (and that is really annoying because I don’t really do ill or self pity!) there is a bit of light glimmering, so I can, with some conviction, hope to be going onwards and upwards… Meanwhile I am waiting for the GvHd to kick in!

Thank you for reading so far – just writing it has helped lift the gloom!

Oh yes, Richard & Gillian, the cat’s back!! (although you nearly didn’t have a playground as there was a major system problem on Monday night after we came home – too detailed for now, just enough to say that we had a power failure causing me to stop the computer, which then wouldn’t reboot – that took a couple of hours to fix!)

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