Beryl

Good friends, most of them I have never met, have said that I should carry on posting my thoughts on my lovely wife Beryl, something I thought I would not, or could not do but here I am doing it, I suppose I am on auto pilot.

First of all I would like to thank all those who have sent me emails of condolence from friends at Freedom2Choose and family who read this blog. Your words have lifted me up and made me cry in equal measure. Thank you for your kindness.

I have surprised myself by making arraignments for Beryl's funeral, a thing I thought I would not be able to bear. But through a drunken fug I did so.

Yesterday I had to go to register Beryl's death less than 24 hours after her demise. To say that I didn't want to go there is an understatement. Go there I did, with the help of my bro in law who drove me and had difficulty parking his car. Why are these places difficult to find? Anyway I thought I would be taken to reception and asked to sign something but that did not happen. Instead I was taken to a quiet room, tastefully decorated and a young lady asked me if I wanted coffee or tea. Coffee was given to me and a three quarters of an hour talking about Beryl interview, if you can call it that, ensued. The young lady was very good at her job, she put me, the bereaved, at ease and slipped in the box ticking questions as we talked about Beryl. Then I had to go into the next room to meet the coroner's assistant to finalise the death certificate. Again I was given the sympathy treatment but at no stage did I feel pandered to, I felt at ease, the only time I have done so since she died.

I say all of the above because I realise that many people go through the same thing and I want to help eleviate their pain of having to go through the same thing. I cant thank these people enough for easing me through the burdon of my loss.

When I got home I plucked up the courage to contact a local funeral director. Again they were marvelous and I suppose that part of their job is to make the bereaved feel at ease while they are coming to terms with their loss. Anyway things have been finalised.

My beloved Beryl will be taken from these flats at 11,45am on Thursday the 23rd of February to be taken the short distance to where we were married over 40 years ago and a service will take place. From there she will be taken to the cremetorium where she will go to her final resting place to be cremated to her favourite piece of music, Clair De Lune by Claude Debussey. I will be one of the Pall bearers.

Beryl, you leave a tear in my heart that I don't know if I'll recover from. I love you, always have and always will.

Flying with Angels: Beryl Rosemary Baker (nee Saul) 11.02.1939-16.02.2012. R.I.P.

Today at 1.45pm in the James Cooke Memorial Hospital in Middlesbrough, my beloved wife Beryl passed away. She suffered only from the time I realised that something different was happening and the paramedics came, which was within five to ten minutes. Her pain was alleviated and her breathing regulated by oxygen and she was made comfortable so I would like to thank the doctors, nurses and paramedics for making my wife's last few hours on this earth free of pain and stress to her weakening body.

My Beryl loved life and hated cruelty, in all it's forms. She was an animal lover who could not see them suffer at the hands of people or their ineptitude to look after them. She hated war, in it's many forms and could not understand why man would kill man nor politicians that would send young men to kill fellow young men, no matter what country they came from...yet she married me, a soldier. She was an artist, musician (kinda good on the piano organ :¬), sorry Beryl,) and a campaigner for womens rights. She campaigned against the testing of the atom bomb by the Frence in the eighties and stood outside a supermarket gatherning signatures while I gave not much support for her cause.

Above all Beryl turned a 19 year old boy into a man! She turned that boy's life into a life worth living, a life full of love, not hatred, caring, not sentiment and certainly not a life that condemns a human being through the colour of their skin. Beryl was, and still is, my hero.

God bless my darling wife, you are no longer dancing with wolves but dancing with angels, and I know you loved dancing, expecially balet. Dance with the angels my love.

In the words of Whitney Houston:

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU.

The end.

Being pulled apart. Part 2: A care home is not a home from home.

13 days after her return from hospital Beryl was once again uprooted, this time to a care home called Ormesby Grange. Fortunately enough Ormesby Grange was only a ten minute walk from the flats down the main road that runs beside this building and I was able to visit every day, twice a day. On the day I picked her up from the care home I was told by the staff that they thought she may have a urinary infection as her urine had a strong odour, a pointer to such an infection. The infection had  made Beryl more unresponsive than usual and she was sleeping for long periods and losing her apatite and unable to take much liquids, a most worrying time as her brother died last month and he had stopped drinking and eating. I called the doctor and she prescribed antibiotics. Seven or eight days later I got a phone call from the doctor saying that the antibiotics she had prescribed were resistant to that type of Urinary Infection but when I told her that I thought the infection was gone as her urine no longer had an odour she left it at that. A few days later I smelt the same odour that pointed to her recent infection and once again she stopped, or could not swallow fluids or food to any life sustaining degree.

I got the doctor out again yesterday and he prescribed a more potent antibiotic, which I took to the chemist who, would you believe, did not have it in stock so I had to wait till today to get it. She has had one dose and another two to go before bedtime so I do hope this takes effect rather quickly as it is hard to eat myself when Beryl has been without much food or drink for so long.

Since Beryl came out of hospital after the new year I have called the doctor and the NHS Direct a few times and each time a doctor came to see her they gave her the full treatment, ie blood pressure check, heart monitoring and chest monitoring and found her chest, heart and blood pressure ok which relieves my mind somewhat and can only think that this damn infection of the Urinary Tract has took the wind out of her sails but each time she goes through such things it appears to me her dementia gets that little bit worse, I do hope I am wrong but I fully realise there is no fairytale ending to Alzheimer's, I know how it ends but I do not know when. I am preparing for the worse because I know it is coming, will we see this year out together I keep wondering?

Beryl is in what I see as being in the late stages of her dementia and can no longer communicate to me or others by word of mouth. She can walk, with my aid and I now have a wheelchair to take her on longer journeys to the shops which I have not done so much recently due to the bad weather and her present ill health. She communicates anger pretty well which lets me know when I am doing something wrong. This can be unhelpful at times like when I am trying to give her medicine or feeding her by hand, which I have to do. Sometimes when feeding her and she gets angry she takes the spoon out of my hand to feed herself, which bolsters me because that is one thing why I married her, she always was her own woman so it is ironic that she is reduced to this. Beryl turned 73 today the 11th of February 2012.

Recently the news has been full of reports about the treatment of our elderly and vulnerable who are cared by the state and the news does not bode well. This is why I have vowed that Beryl and I will leave this world in our own home rather than spend our days being looked after by others that do not know us and probably do not care to know us. When our life cycle ends naturally it's good to go in your own bed. Sorry for appearing to be so maudlin.

PS: Things are at a stage now with me and Beryl that I have not time to add anything to the Freedom2Choose blog and my interests are elsewhere as Beryl's decline gets more pronounced. I will carry on looking after the mundain things for F2C like office duties but blog writing and commenting on all things smoking ban are not of my biggest concern at the moment.

To be continued...

Being pulled apart. Part 1: A not so Happy New Year

A couple of days before new year 2011 I noticed that Beryl had a "rattle" on her chest whenever she breathed and was worried. I thought at first it was just the phlegm there due to her stopping smoking earlier in the year. By Friday the 30th of December I was sufficiently worried to call out the doctor who reckoned that she had a chest infection and prescribed antibiotics. By midnight, after only two doses of antibiotics I was about to go to bed but could not as I percieved that her breathing had gotten worse. I panicked and phoned 999 for an ambulance. After much deliberation by the ambulance service it was decided that they would send out an emergency doctor rather than send an ambulance, twenty minutes it was said it would take for them to arrive. One hour later, no Doctor. I phoned 999 again and this time an ambulance was called, it was now around 1.30am on New Years Eve.

It was six thirty am on that day that, after being ignored every hour, on the hour whilst we were enconsed in a cubicle, that some junior doctor finally decided to admit her. I noticed that the A&E was not exactly over crowded and saw the doctor, and in turn, the nurse chatting and laughing as though they had no work to do and was unimpressed, to say the least. I believe in the National Health Service but I do despair at the way it is going, I really do.

By six thirty that new years eve morn I was exhausted as we put Beryl into a bed on a ward until, in turn, a nurse and a doctor saw her and I was needed to attend. Apart from the usual form filling I was needed to reasure her and help hold her while they stuck needles in her arm, one for a blood sample and another for the insertion of a cannula into the back of her hand for intrevenous drips of antibotics and saline. I got home briefly at around 10 am and fell asleep exhausted.

I visited at three pm that new years eve and Beryl's arm was a mass of bruises from the numerous invasions into her veins, later the cannula was to be transplanted into her stomach and another mass of bruise ensued. I wept for her pain later that day.

Beryl was released from the hospital on January the 3rd 2012, the same day her brother Colin was cremeated, her brother who was wracked with vascular dementia, the dementia that ultimately killed him, things do not bode well and I know the outcome of this scenario, it's just when?

The next upheaval is when Beryl went into respite whilst the council removed the deadly Asbestos that has been with us this last forty odd years. This upheaval took place on Tuesday the 17th of January.

Part two to be continued...