At about 5.00am on Saturday morning I phoned the Medical Emergency and Assessment Unit, the Ward that dad had been admitted to, to check on his progress. To my complete dismay they told me he'd been transferred to another ward, Carlton Colby, the previous evening at 10.00pm, just an hour after I'd left for the night. They were worried about dad's breathing and so had moved him to a ward specialising in respiratory problems. I was angered and unsettled about what seemed to me a very sudden change of plan late at night of which they'd been no indication just an hour earlier.
I phoned the new ward and spoke to Sandra, one of the nurses, who didn't seem to be seeing my dad as a dying man in the way that the clinicians on the MEAU I thought had. She was resistant to my visiting outside normal hours of 2.00pm to 9.00pm whereas on the MEAU they had given me a free hand to come and go at any time of the day or night. I felt intensely upset and angry, but tried not to be confrontative as I wasn't really in full control of myself.
In the end I dropped into the ward at about 9.00am, after I knew Sandra would have gone off shift, to check on dad. Sandra had told me she'd been communicating with dad, but by the time I arrived he was deeply asleep, I guessed he must have been exhausted by the sheer effort of breathing. I returned to the ward at 2.00pm and stayed until 10.00pm, holding dad's hand most of the time. As time went on it became clear dad was sliding deeper into unconsciousness and a doctor who visited him in the afternoon made it clear to me that the end was near, in fact that given the x-rays they'd taken when he was first admitted it was surprising he hadn't died already.
When Sandra came back on shift in the evening she was much more accommodating and helped me get comfortable on some lounge chairs and settle in for the night. At about 9.00pm I went to a local pub and had a couple of glasses of wine to insulate me a little from the trial to come. In fact, by about 11.00pm, unable to sleep and with dad hanging on in there I decided to go back to his place to get some sleep. I was fairly sure dad wouldn't regain consciousness and I didn't want to linger by the bedside willing him to die so I could get some rest.
Driving back, psychotic with tiredness I tripped a speed camera, caring little. I fell into bed and actually slept for a while. At 7.30am I was getting dressed ready to go back to the ward when the 'phone rang and a nurse told me died had just died. I asked if I could see him on the ward and got there about thirty minutes later and put my head round the curtains hiding his bed. Dad was lying there in clean bedlinen and a tidy gown with a slightly incongruous yellow plastic rose on his tummy. He looked still and dead, my strongest memory is of a red line on each side of his mouth where the oxygen mask had been. I flashed back to the same scene in a nearby ward some 22 years ago when my mother had died. Like her I could just make out his stiff dead tongue through his slightly open mouth. I kissed him on the forehead and said "goodbye dad".
I said my thanks to the nurses as I walked out of the ward in a daze. I was headed for the main hospital exit whilst racking my brain for the name of the ward on which my mum had died. Suddenly I stopped and looked up and saw the sign "Shuttleworth Ward", the place she'd died. I'd actually walked the wrong way, guided by my unconscious perhaps. I retraced my steps and headed for the exit and my car. At a loose end I drove into Lincoln and had a cup of coffee in a Costa in the old city centre, badly in need of a dose of ordinary life. My macchiato tasted good and I felt an overpowering sense of relief.
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