Hello All... back late last night, very tired.
I was pretty spot on about what happened re. visits. I seemed to be symptom free on the trip up, to the point where I concluded that the ongoing scratchy throat was probably just me being paraniod... so I visited Mum and Dad with my sister on the Sunday, keeping a cautious distance as much as possible just in case. Sunday night my nose went gluggy, not too badly. The sort of mild cold symptoms that you'd normally completely ignore, but yup, that meant I couldn't visit again, not even with a mask on.
That was harder to take than I'd expected. Both my sister and I were in tears afterwards. She couldn't face going in alone, so we all went "home" to Mum and Dad's house. ("All" as in Hubby and Younger Daughter did come up after all... but also couldn't visit.) A good friend of ours was willing and able to go with my sister to visit both the next day. I was very keen that she visit them as much as possible while she could.
The day after, I went with in the car for company while my sister visited, but stayed outside. While sitting outside the home, a phone notification came through that the home would close to all visitors except on occasional "compassionate grounds" from that evening. And my sister walked out with one of the nurses to discuss the need to clear out part of Mum's room so that they could get a lifter in there when she came out of hospital. So our family got special dispensation to go in, carefully masked up, so that we could do that job. Bonus of that was that we got to briefly visit Dad too, but with five feet of caution between us, and no hugs... 😞 Would really have loved to give him a hug, but completely understand and agree with the reasoning behind not doing so. And Mum won't be happy that we've removed some of her craft odds and ends, but we were careful to choose things we haven't seen her using, or reduce things she does use to a selection of the best (nicest patchwork fabrics, favourite colours of yarn and suchlike).
And that was it. Yesterday was the trip home, and we have no idea when (or if, if we're going to be honest) we'll see them again. BUT we were there when it mattered, and when it was possible to visit them.
On the other front- Older Daughter had at least one repair trip to hospital while we were away. I've re-emphasised the importance of her keeping herself out of hospital as much as possible. There's a very real likelihood that in the weeks/months ahead, hospitals will be too busy with more urgently life threatening situations, and may not be able to attend to non-life-threatening situations like hers until well after the ideal treatment window. If there's no beds free for plastic surgery, there's nothing they can do... Could get ugly. 😞
