Low life | 4 July 2019

As they say: it all happened so quickly that it wasn’t until afterwards. One minute I was bawling at my sister, the next NHS workers arrived from all directions and removed my mother from her house to a nursing home. It was like the dramatic conclusion to an undercover ‘sting’ operation. They came streaming in through the front door laughing and joking. To avoid doing anything silly or controversial, I removed myself from the scene.

While my mother was being carried out of her front door, a diplomatic mission was dispatched to offer me a confection of emollient explanations. This consisted of a community nurse and an occupational therapist. They were not women to argue from first principles. Legality was all that mattered. She was being hawked off to a nursing home for ‘safety’ reasons, they said. ‘Safety’ was paramount, they said. Legally, two nurses were required to lift her. It was no longer safe for me to do this myself.