A week on: FL

It is a week since FL was at the hospital, so I thought I would do a little catch up post.

The first thing to say is that he is not very happy. I wouldn't call it "depressed", but he is certainly "low". In his own words, he is feeling sorry for himself. He deals with this by projecting it all on to me: "If you had known this would happen, you would never have come North to be with me", or "You should never have married this old man". So then I have to deluge him in reassurances, that actually I love him and I am glad that I was here when he needed me, to look after him. At which he shakes his head sadly and says "No, no no." Sigh.

He managed to do 4 holes of golf on Sunday. That's his first time on the course in months and he was shattered afterwards. But he did it. It's a start! He is still sleeping a lot during the day, but is making the effort to be getting up when I arrive home from work, rather than just going to bed.

His diet is erratic. He gets through an alarming number of tins of soup in a day! He used to make his own vats of broth but can't be bothered at the moment. Tinned sardines, oatcakes and chocolate biscuits are also popular. My main worry about his diet is that he fills himself with processed, pre-packaged food during the day (which he buys himself as I don't even go near those aisles in the supermarket) and then doesn't want the freshly cooked main meals I cook. I have suggested he re-heats his portion of dinner the following day but it never seems to interest him. Fresh fruit is not as appealing as tinned syrup-laden peaches. The more I think about it, the more I think he is reverting to the food of his childhood - maybe it is a comfort thing.

He has been taking Paracetamol more regularly. His back is painful all the time. He cannot feel his feet, so they get very cold without him noticing. He has started to get headaches, which he has never suffered from before. He gets up twice a night for about an hour each time as he finds lying down too uncomfortable. However, I think the "electric shocks" are less frequent.

And then we had an "incident" which shook us both:

On Friday night, he took my daughter to her dancing class. The phone rang, and a young woman said: "Is that Mrs [FL's surname]?" Yes. "This is the National Crime Bureau... giggle giggle giggle". I hung up on her. The number was witheld when I dialled 1471. When FL came home, he was raging. Someone had smashed up the heavy wooden fence which surrounds the wheelie bins at the end of the farm road, and thrown the bins around. Two were broken: lids and wheels off. It would have taken quite a concentrated effort to do all the damage that was done. We rang the police. They refused to accept that the two incidents were linked, even though we explained that FL's name is not in the phone book, so it had to be someone who knew him who rang me. They seemed to think that a fence to enclose rubbish bins was insignificant and without value.

So now we are paranoid. FL is convinced someone is out to get him. There have been other incidents down by the bins: they were set on fire last year, and our bin stolen a few months later. When my car was parked down there during the snow, it mysteriously ran out of oil, coolant and brake fluid, all within the space of a week.

I suppose it gives him something to think about. But it's not pleasant.