The nylon python

 Ever since I can remember, I have been afflicted with the kind of shoulders a bra strap must slip off. It's annoying, so annoying in fact that I recall my sister-in-law schooling my niece on how dreadful my slipping straps are and how she must take care not to be like Aunty Kylie. If I have had no other use in life, I have demonstrated the sartorial horror of the falling strap.

In order to combat this problem, I sometimes wear a racer back sports bra. Now the issue with these is that they don't have any clips so they have to go on over my head.

Forgive me the technicalities but I need to set this scene.

Even though it is now April and officially mid-autumn, Sydney is still warm and humid so sticky skin is very much a normal state of being.

This morning I was already running late for work when I finished showering. I knew it was going to be tricky getting a bra on so I left it to almost last, trying to make sure I was at the lowest possible level of clammy.

I dragged it over my head and immediately knew I was in trouble. It was twisted and coiled like an old telephone cord. The band, which should sit flat against ribcage was twisted and stuck and the rest of the fabric was twisted and stuck with it. At the front I could drag it into a semi-correct position but the tension caused by the twisting pulled it up so that it was cutting under my arms and barely below my collar at the back.

I twisted and squirmed, arms reaching over my head then up from my waist. I couldn't reach it with more than a finger tip. I just could not get the thing unstuck. Then more I twisted, the sweatier I got. It was a losing battle. Should I take it off and start over? I was already late and there was no guarantee I would be any more successful.

No, I would gather my stuff and head off. Maybe I could wiggle it down in the car. 

At the first set of lights, which can be a long, long wait I dragged my shirt up a bit to try freeing the dreadful fabric coil from my armpits. I wasn't exposed in any indecent way but it was still pretty awkward when I made eye contact with the young tradie in the ute next to me. 

Onto plan B.

For the rest of the drive, the nylon python coiled around me, cutting in oddly to make new asymmetrical shapes of my body, rolling itself tighter and creeping into positions bras should not go.

When I pulled up at work, there was just a small chance that I could clock on in the five minute grace period. Ignoring the nylon python and the synthetic uniform shirt clinging and creeping up my back, I grabbed my stuff and high tailed it to the clock, hoping not to meet anybody in the lift.

I clocked in and said a very quick hello to my office buddy, hoping my clattering bags would distract her from my appearance, then back tracked to the bathroom.

Now that I had calmed down, clocked in and cooled off in the air conditioning, it took just a quick hook of a finger and a little smooth down to restore comfort and shape.

The body strangling nylon python had been subdued into boring bra-dom.

Good Friday 2026

Easter will forever be imprinted in my mind as the time when Dad suddenly became entirely different to his usual self. Looking back there had been more of a slow decline than I had realised but it was almost Easter when he raised a walking stick threatening to hit someone and it was Easter when he stopped answering calls and text messages. I was remembering all of this yesterday and had a wee cry. The first in many months.

This morning, Mum called at 6am to tell me her call bell wasn't working and despite my tiredness I didn't go back to sleep, instead I pottered then went to church and drove somebody home. 

Given that it is Good Friday, church was solemn. In addition I am sore with a nagging back issue and maybe the grief glitter is being blown around at the moment.

With this mild irritability as my background state today, I was mighty surprised to find my self singing a children's song I must have learnt 45 years ago:

I am a promise, I am a possibility,

I am a promise, with a capital P

I am a great big bundle of po-ten-ti-al-ity-y

.......

I am a promise to be anything God wants me to be.

The song is completely incongruent with the day and honestly, with the trajectory of my life.

The happy little children's song was soon pushed aside when I arrived to find Mum had been given an "analogue" bell, the type you might see on a shop counter, and was hitting it madly:

ding ding ding

ding ding ding

ding ding ding ding ding ding ding

God Bless the carers.

On that long ago execution friday, nobody knew what would happen on Sunday and today I am reminded that nothing is over until it's over.

Delirium

 When we think about the health issues of old age, the issues that will really reduce independence or limit life span, we probably think of broken hips, frailty or dementia but when we really get into the trenches, we meet a thing we rarely hear about: delirium.

  Delirium is a sudden, temporary state of severe confusion and impaired cognition, often arising from underlying illness, surgery or medication changes in hospitalised or older adults. 

My mum has been hospitalised several times over the last few years and has had delirium each time. According to the definition, delirium is temporary but what the definition doesn't tell us is that, oftentimes, people don't fully recover. Mum has been left with a cognitive loss after every episode. One time she had a long running difficulty with numbers, it seemed to eventually resolve but for many months she would use numbers in ways that were just so far wrong, it was impossible to make sense of. She would announce a heart rate of 300 or a blood pressure of 20, she thought her wedding was in the 90s (1968)

Mum also developed confusion about her phone service. She had once had a working understanding of internet service, mobile phones and landline but after delirium they were all dumped into a cognitive basket for communications and she would say things like she couldn't find an email because the phone at the house had been disconnected. No amount of explaining could help her understand but she also refused to let go of trying make it make sense so we had an ongoing saga of "trying to pay for the phone/ fix the phone/ fix the email" which just couldn't be solved.

A man who came to work looking for care for his dad expressed his frustration about deliriuim and about the silence around it, saying that his dad developed delirium after a surgery and was still impaired months down the track. He thought he might have taken a different approach to his father's medical decisions if he had understood the implications of surgery in old age. He commented that unresolved delirium is the same as dementia and he was right, technically speaking delirium and dementia are different but if they make a person confused and steal independence, the end result is the same.

These past two weeks, mum has been hospitalised again and has developed the worst yet case of delirium. When I visited on Thursday she asked when Dad was coming, tried to rip her oxygen off, wanted to know if she had to pay for a towel (apropos of nothing), undressed herself multiple times, kicked her sheets constantly and told fantastical stories about the great buffet that had been laid out (in a public hospital) and which she wasn't allowed to eat. She wanted her bed up and down about 6 times in a half hour and was angry when I asked how I could help her. After I left she spent the whole night trying to climb out of bed. 

It was bad enough that every nurse I spoke to on Friday mentioned it, including some who had been working down the corridor.

After seeing all that, I went home on Thursday night sure that Mum was dying and trying to figure out how to get her back to her nursing home so she could live her final days in peace. When I visited on Friday she was sitting up in bed writing text messages to her grand daughters, still a bit confused but much more herself. I guess I can leave her in hospital to finish treatment after all.

I'm sure there will be permanent cognitive changes again and I wonder how we will navigate them. The good thing this time is she has an aged care facility to return to and we won't be trying to manage a confused, combative person on our own.