Tablets and Tea

Pads walked from the car to the clinic, where he was weighed and found to be a kilo lighter than last time. He told the consultant that he did not want any more flax seed oil, which Uncle Neil had kindly researched and provided. It may seem strange that he's refusing this, considering all the other interventions he's tolerated. Perhaps the difference is the level of trust he puts in the doctors. The consultant confirmed that if they thought it would help they'd be prescribing it. Of course, alternative therapists might scoff at that, but, even in this degenerate age, we generally believe that the hippocratic oath still stands for something.
Pads' diet is much reduced now. He will generally only eat the occasional bite (e.g. a twiglet to go with a tablet that requires him to take it with food), although he drinks plenty of tea. We'll be boosting the PEG feeds to two bottles a day. We start one off very slowly (20mls) at 9pm in order to turn it up at 11pm (to 60mls) which means it should finish around 6am. This avoids him needing to get up in the night, when the best of us are bleary and unstable, but he's also got to shuffle along with the feed pump in his (good) right hand, risking a fall. At 6am we can swap out the empty bottle, give the morning meds and possibly not see him again until midday. But it partly depends on what is planned for the day. He got up for the tutor arriving at 9:30 on Thursday. Last Friday Pads enjoyed a trip to see 'Jonny English' with some of his old school-mates. We'd forewarned them that he's using a crutch, slurring words, perhaps a bit quieter. In the event though he was able to 'raise his game', he was quite chatty and refused the wheelchair in favour of walking the 200 metres to the movie theatre. Whether it was this that wore him out or not, he spent only a few hours of last weekend out of bed. After wanting to be at the evening service, he'd dropped off in his back-room seat and was uncomfortably difficult to rouse.
Yesterday he was pleased to visit the beach. For a while he's wanted to get Jack (our Jack Russell dog) to have a dip in the sea to cure his stinkiness! His memory loss may be to blame for not quite connecting that Jack's problems are mainly 'internal'.