Nightmare or Halloween?

Mum is STILL in hospital, just completing her fifth week and commencing her sixth. She exists in a nightmare world - half true and half made-up.

The half made-up nightmare is explained by the strong cocktail of painkillers she is on.  She tells me quite confidentially that the patient in the bed opposite arrived last night through the ceiling, so if I hear a bump from above, it's another one arriving. I swallow hard, trying to stem the tears I feel coming into my eyes. That is not the mum I know. The one who, five weeks ago devoured the BBC News Channel for entertainment and read the newspaper cover to cover. Some days I cannot rouse her at all and spend an hour of my visiting time just watching her sleep. A few days ago, when a nurse was administering some more oral opiates, she asked mum to confirm her date of birth and mum could not remember it. Who forgets their date of birth? My mum is currently a basket-case. Her eyes show very little consciousness behind them even when they are open. She will be in mid-sentence and either drift off to sleep or get easily distracted into silence, if a nurse walks by, and forget her thread of conversation. She speaks slowly, barely audible, as if conversation is an effort and as if she would prefer to return to her twilight world.

The half-true nightmare is that to date she has not improved at all, but got far worse. The infection in her leg (although it could be anywhere for all we have been told) rages on and the pain is still not under control. Until she is medically fit, the hospital do not want to discharge her, either to her home or to a half-way rehab care home. In five weeks we have not seen or been contacted by a consultant once. As my mother is hard of hearing and in a world of her own, you would think they would contact the relatives to discuss the plan. There is a consultant, I am told, but they have yet to make themselves known to me and I have tried to contact them without success. The day-to-day running of the ward is left to two juniors fresh out of university and definitely both under the age of 25. They looked overwhelmed, when I approach them for updates, and naively experiment on the patients including my mother. I have tried to be patient and let them get their practice in, but after five weeks I am losing patience (and they are in danger of losing patients), as I watch them struggling to cope. My mother is now so institutionalised and confined to her bed/chair/bed/chair that she cannot now stand up from her chair on her own even to use the commode. They now need to use a hoist to move her about. What a difference five weeks make when she was living independently in her own flat and getting around, albeit slowly behind a zimmer frame. She has deteriorated 100% both physically and mentally in the space of 35 days.

I have expressed my concerns repeatedly over the last few weeks. The infection has not gone and the pain is still there at the expense of her being almost unconscious or confused the whole time. Every time I express concern, they do not listen, but instead bump up the levels of painkillers, making her even more senseless.  I feel the anger in me rising. Enough is enough. I want some answers and real solutions. Time to knock some heads together methinks and demand to see someone over the age of 25 to sort this out!