UPPER TIERS BLOG: SPEED DEMON!

I am a bad boy.

I’m doing a speed awareness course today. I know, I know. I’m an idiot. I was ten MPH over on a stretch of motorway that had a temporarily reduced speed limit.

This is the second time I’ve done such a course. The previous one was probably about 15 years ago. Oddly, I quite enjoyed it that first time around.

The process has changed a lot – the first one was a whole day thing, with classroom stuff in the morning, and going out with an instructor in the afternoon – a bit like doing a driving test. The instructor and I just spent the whole of our drive chatting, and the only time he corrected my driving was when I drove off the end of a pier into the sea.

That last bit isn't true.

Now it’s all online for a couple of hours over Microsoft Teams, with no practical driving bit.

 I’m not quite sure what to expect, or why it needs to last two-and-three-quarter hours, but I suppose that’s the punishment. Perhaps I'll get to play some sort of only driving simulator thing!

OTHER STUFF I’VE GOT GOING ON

I can’t recall if I mentioned this, but my mum has now been officially diagnosed with dementia. We had to push for it, because they apparently can only do something like one assessment a year – and the previous one back in the spring somehow cleared her as “Not Mental”.

They now think she has something called Lewy bodies dementia, with delirium superimposed on the top of that. They are trying her on some new medication to help with the latter, but there isn’t much they can do for the former sadly. It’s hard to explain what her symptoms are, because they’re different every time we see her.

A diagnosis doesn’t really help us deal with it emotionally, but there is some small comfort in it. I know some of you have been through similar, and the emotions are impossible to convey unless you’ve experienced it first-hand.

Emotionally, it’s become a sort of dull ache of loss, compared to the sharp panic we were all feeling when she was living at home, and we were all trying to wrap our heads around why it seemed so damn impossible to look after her. Honestly... I keep saying it, but my brain still reels when I think how difficult it was.

I just wish we’d realised sooner that she wasn’t operating with a full deck, as it might’ve made the last couple of years slightly easier to cope with.

It’s easier now – kind of – that she’s fully mad and in the home, but every visit is draining and upsetting. It’s basically why I left the Block Party early last weekend – I’d been to see her, and it had left me a bit shaken. It always takes me a little while to rebalance afterwards.

The upside of all this is that the psychiatrist has said she can now be assessed for NHS Continuing Health Care – which means that some, or all, of her nursing home costs might be paid for.

We’ve been warned it’s very difficult to get, though having been through the checklist, she should easily qualify. Especially as she now needs one-on-one care, and more or less constant monitoring, as she's constantly demanding, and tends to sometimes forget she can't walk. I honestly don't know how the staff cope.

We’d been forced to put her house on the market to pay for the nursing home, so we’re keeping our fingers tightly crossed.

Also, thankfully, her form of dementia isn’t hereditary. I'm mad enough already, right? God help my children when I get to that age.