IMMOBILITY AND A TRIP TO WHALSAY

After the cheerful diarising of last week's post, I could have known that, in the words of the song, there would be trouble ahead. I was first aware that things were not as they should be when I phoned my sister Thelma on Monday morning. She told me that our mother had developed an extremely painful right arm over the weekend, and was no longer able to use her zimmer frame to get around the house. This meant that, to all intents and purposes, she had lost what mobility she had. Thelma suggested that she could pick me up at 10am, and we would go out to Whiteness to see if we could lend a hand in some way. Mary, my other sister, had been managing the situation since Saturday evening. I first took the opportunity to post the package containing the painting for the charity auction; I could then concentrate on helping things along at mother's.

The situation was quite grave. Mother now needed help with every small detail of her personal life, and, while Mary had been ably supplying this, with the assistance of the home helps, she now needed to attend to other matters for a while. She had a friend coming up to stay with her for a few days over the Up-Helly-A' festivities, amongst other things. Neither Thelma nor I could carry out the personal care functions, so we had to find either home or institutional care for our mother. A medical diagnosis, carried out by a nurse and doctor, had established inflammation as the cause of the pain, and not a stress fracture, as we first had feared. The problem could be treated with anti-inflammatories, which were prescribed by the doctor, and collected from the Scalloway practice by Thelma and I in the afternoon (by now we felt in need of a run out somewhere!).

We got the Council's Social Work department involved, and they came up with a week's residential care at the Fernlea Care Centre on the island of Whalsay. I organised the transport (by wheelchair-friendly minibus and ferry), while Thelma packed a case for mother. I volunteered to go on the trip to "Da Bonnie Isle" with her, and at just before 6pm, we set off, leaving Thelma to see to the locking up.

Because of the ferry timetable, we had to spend most of the evening on the island, where the wonderful staff at Fernlea duly fed us with haggis, veg and tatties, and helped mother to settle in to her new temporary home. Since then, her arm has become much better and, last I heard, she has been using the zimmer frame to get to the toilet again. Now I am faced with the problem of getting her back home, and this has become quite a headache, as heavy snow on Friday will have completely blocked the steep private access road to her house, and it's snowing again now. I hope to enlist the aid of the Council's Roads department to clear it, and I've provisionally made the necessary transport bookings. I need things to go right tomorrow!