Teamwork

Diary blip for self.

After a whirlwind fortnight we moved my uncle into a care home in Oxford today.

As I wrote in our WhatsApp group six days ago, after 70 messages in one day, 'Well done, everyone. This is one of the best bits of project management I've ever seen and we didn't even have a Gantt chart.'

13 days ago my brother and his daughter saw a message from a friend of our uncle, R, that he wasn't answering his phone. By the time I saw the message and phoned my brother, he and his daughter were already driving to London. They found R on the floor, where he'd been without food and water for three days. The ambulance crew arrived in far less time than you would believe from newspaper reports of the dire state of the NHS and asked him how long he'd been on the floor. He was indignant - 'I'm comfortable in my bed'. I had no idea that it was possible to be three days dehydrated and feel comfortable.

The ambulance crew were brilliant. The hospital staff were brilliant.

Six days ago I started ringing round care homes in Oxford, a place R loves. One had a vacancy and invited me to visit. I jumped on my bike and 90 minutes later I was signing the application form. (I could, because last year we went through the bureaucratic process to make my brother and me R's attorneys.) An hour after that our mum, visiting R in hospital, confirmed he wanted to move in.

The family, mostly my brother, has done a vast amount of admin and practical work since then: getting R's house keys and cleaning sorted out, organising a new bedroom carpet (tmi), visiting R, and liaising with the hospital and the home. At 8.30 this morning my brother picked me up on his way to London and at 2pm we were back in Oxford, having stopped at R's house to collect essential items and our mum who'd been doing the clothes packing, then at the hospital to pick up R.

If you and everyone you care about doesn't have a Power of Attorney in place, do it, now!