This is our beautiful winter-flowering clematis, it looked so lovely against the very blue sky.It has been ages since I posted, and I need to tell you why, since life as I know it has radically altered, keeping me away from many things I'd like to do. I have been completely unable to visit all of my blogging friends and I am concerned I may have missed many significant events in your lives and not responded to comments, and if so I am very sorry. The joy of having a blog for many of us is the fantastic relationships we have built up with other bloggers and I hate that I can't be involved in what is happening for you as much as I'd choose.
My 82 year old mum has been poorly for quite a while now, but her friends and I have been increasingly concerned about her behaviour over the past few weeks and I have needed to become much more involved in her life than ever before - 6 months ago she was completely independent, driving, involved in many social groups, even giving talks about her experiences as an actress. Then she developed auto-immune hepatitis, the treatment for which is strong immunosupressants to stop the body further attacking the liver. She's not been right since but very rapidly declined over the last two weeks and has been admitted to hospital, where she is being treated for an infection that is making her body shut down while it fights the infection itself, and she is very confused and hallucinating, totally changed. There is every chance she will recover from the infection in time, but due to complex circumstances I won't go into much, it will be against medical advice for her to go home - whatever happens life will be extremely difficult for a long while. She lives alone in a large, timber-framed, listed sixteenth-century cottage with some small outbuildings and ever such a lot of rooms, filled with an incredible amount of objects/furniture/paperwork/family things/junk mail/you-name-it-it's-there. To her, everything she has is needed. To gently suggest clearing anything produces great distress, it's been like this all my life, but now has reached a critical stage.
So that's about where things are, and why I haven't been here.
We know she will be cared for in hospital for a while and can plan round that for a couple of weeks but I have to say it's been chaos recently, and as soon as she is medically stable and the hospital is ready to discharge her, the real problems will begin as we try and find a workable solution to very tricky issues.
I have fantastic friends, and have been almost overwhelmed with how supportive and understanding my mum's friends have been too - they care about her a very great deal, but are also mindful of the problems we will face to get her back into a more ordered home environment.
I'm hoping over the next week or so to post about some more cheerful things that I've been waiting to share, including how great John Lewis is after the experience I shared in my last post all that time ago! And, of course, how wonderful Archie is!
