Never tempt fate!

My last blog entry ended with the phrase ‘until reality and human nature intervene and I get diverted yet again!’

Fateful words.

Almost as soon as I had written them my brother ‘phoned me to tell me that he was on his way to Queen’s Hospital in Romford, Essex, because my father had fallen over and had been taken to the Accident and Emergency Centre there. By sheer luck my brother had been on his way to see my father in his care home when the accident happened. The home had ‘phoned him and he had been able to divert his journey.

My brother stayed with my father until the latter had been treated and tests made to find out why he fell over. The outcome was that my father had to have a number of butterfly stitches to close a long gash over his right eye. The gash had been caused when he had fallen over and hit his head on the corner of a radiator cover. The right eye was badly bruised and swollen, and my father could not open it. Both knees were also bruised and swollen, and they were unable to support my father’s weight if he tried to stand. In addition they discovered that he had a urinary infection (again!), that his blood pressure dropped if he stood up, and that he was dehydrated.

The hospital decided to keep my father in overnight and on Thursday I took over the task of dealing with the hospital, visiting my father, and coping with all the other sundry details that arise from an elderly person being admitted to hospital. I spent most of Thursday waiting for my father to be moved from the Medical Assessment Unit to a normal ward. The hospital told me not to visit until he was transferred, with the result that I waited … and waited … and waited. The ‘he’ll be moved in the next hour’ message seemed to be repeated ever hour until the early afternoon when they finally moved him to a medical ward. Armed with the details of where he now was my wife and I went to the hospital (and what should have been a fifty minute journey took us nearly twice as long thanks to a traffic jam at the Dartford Crossing!) having collected his washing and shaving kit from the care home on the way. We stayed with him for some time, but he was sedated so that he could cope with the discomfort of his injuries … and to prevent him from trying to remove the butterfly stitches that were obviously irritating him.

We returned to see him yesterday, and it was good to note that the swelling on his eye was considerably smaller. He slept for most of the time we were there, but he was fully conscious for a short time and it was obvious that he was finding it difficult to cope with the pain in his knees. The staff told us that he was eating and drinking quite normally but that he was spending most of his time sleeping.

My brother has taken over from me today, and no doubt he will find my father in better health when he visits him. At present we are unsure what will happen tomorrow as the hospital will be quite difficult to get to … because the Olympic Torch Relay is passing through that area and quite a few roads are going to be closed and diversions will be in operation. As both my brother and I can only get there by car, this will pose a problem for us.

The upshot of all of this is that for the past two days I have done absolutely no work on any of my wargaming projects … and I cannot see that situation changing for at least another couple of days. That said, the doorbell range just before I sat down to write this blog entry and the postman delivered a large parcel containing two MEMOIR ’44 expansion sets. I have yet to open them … but doing so will give me something wargamery to do.