An update from England...

I have been over in the UK for almost a week now and I am sort of settling in to the time change and the routine now. It has been a week of hospital visits and nothing much else really. Mum was and still is pretty weak – at the ripe old age of 86 you don’t quite bounce back to health very easily. The doctors think they have found the reason for all her problems – nothing to do with the fall she had – they discovered a liver infection that had likely been causing all sorts of problems for her in the last few weeks.

A drain in her side and a cocktail of antibiotics and pain killers appear to be doing the trick - although it all appears to be happening very slowly.

On the positive side, it is good for me (and for anyone really) to be around the hospital environment for a while. It helps remind me of what, most likely, we all have to look forward to if we live beyond our 70’s. Medical science has done wonderful things for curing so many problems, but there are still so many chronic diseases that cannot be cured but only ameliorated with pain killers, anti-coagulants, insulin, etc. The quality of life just does not look that great for so many of these patients. The lucky ones are those that still have their mental facilities, I guess.