Snapshot Number 2

It is August 2008. A few months after her strange phone call to me in France denying all knowledge of our holiday, my mother’s behaviour has become increasingly odd and her health, both physical and mental is starting to cause us and her friends some concern.

My mother has started to complain about her volunteer position, a post she had enjoyed enormously for the past two years and where she had forged a number of new friendships. She tells me she has given in her notice and will not be going in anymore. She has also become quite emotionally unstable – calling me frequently at work and at home, saying she has fallen out with various friends, crying and then hanging up. At the same time, her friends are calling me saying she had told them she has fallen out with me. She has a ruptured baker’s cyst on her leg and although this clears up quickly and completely, she repeatedly tells me and others that she is completely immobile and I should come up immediately to look after her or that she needs to go into a home.

Things come to a head in early August when I receive a call in the late morning from a paramedic in my mother’s house. My mother has called 999 in some distress, saying she has banged her head and fainted. The paramedics can find no evidence of this but my mother is insisting she be taken to the hospital straight away. The paramedics calmly explain to me that of course if my mother insists, they will do this, but that they have checked and checked and can find no evidence of physical harm. They have given her some medication to calm her down. I speak with my mother and realise she is fine physically but clearly in great distress mentally. I say I will come that evening and she agrees to stay in her home. I call my mother’s GP straight away who agrees to go round immediately. She calls me later in the day to say she has made an ‘urgent’ referral for my mother to the Community Mental Health Team.

Unsurprisingly, I decide I have to go north straight away.