The great escape

Dad refuses to be detained, even under doctor’s orders.

It was with some trepidation that my sister, brother and I dispatched our father to Christchurch Public Hospital recently.

Not, I hasten to add, that we doubted the care he would get would be anything other than exemplary, but because he can be a very difficult patient.

This is a man who we once found sitting in the garden of a private hospital with his toothbrush in hand having decided to discharge himself and neglecting to advise anyone, including the hospital, he had done so.

Having been informed by the hospital they had inadvertently misplaced him we said that was fine, he was probably in the near vicinity, just not in his allocated bed.

The same man, some years later, decided to again discharge himself, this time from a public hospital. He stole another patient’s walker and made a break for it, managing to get out of the building but remain in the grounds where, yes, you guessed it, he was once more sitting in the garden waiting to be collected. This time he was very ill.

So ill, that the fact he went to hospital in an ambulance and let the paramedics strap him into a bed was a fair indication of how poorly he was. So poorly in fact, that he also allowed himself to be tested, scanned and have his blood taken without a murmur.

He also ate the hospital food happily without demanding the wine list and accepted that fruit salad was a fair substitute for the smoked trout and French sav he generally preferred.

Five days later, he was much improved and we were told that he would be ready for collection from reception at 4.30pm complete with his discharge papers.

All of this was something of a novelty to his children as we had never collected him, properly discharged from any hospital, ever.

Those caring for a parent with dementia will find some of this familiar, but our father is of perfectly sound mind.

Subversive, certainly. Mildly eccentric at times, undoubtedly. Not in the least conventional (apart from his insistence that people should be both punctual and polite as a matter of form), always.

Mentally impaired? Not in the least.

He does, however, suffer from heightened anxiety when it comes to being detained in any place a second longer than he wants to be there. Something he thoughtfully passed onto me.

When he and my mother travelled through Europe many years ago she used to send us postcards that said ‘‘The Louvre; 10 minutes, 35 seconds’’ and ‘‘Stratford-upon-Avon; five minutes, seven seconds.’’

When a tour bus pulled into a plaza in Monte Carlo at the same time my parents arrived at their hotel my father declared the place impossibly crowded.

Maranello in Italy was different as it housed the Ferrari factory and, as a Ferrari owner at the time he found it deserved at least an hour of his time. My mother was not such a fan, declaring they gave her a sore back just looking at them.

Fortunately, England was a joy to them both, with my mother heading straight to Harrods and my father variously at race courses Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Brooklands and Donington.

Now in his late 80s it has come as something of a surprise to him that he can no longer race cars, walk for hours in the country and s go fishing or, even more exciting, climb onto the roof to clear the guttering.

He doesn’t mind not being able to garden because he was never a fan of that, preferring the liberal application of industrial-strength weed killer and a chainsaw to the more conventional trowel and secateurs. Nor does he mind someone coming in once a week to dust because that’s never been high on his list either.

What he could do, however, was cook for himself. However, he has a better idea. In hospital they brought him meals and cups of tea and took away his dishes and did them. It’s seems an ideal set-up and he doesn’t see why this shouldn’t continue. He is drawing up his menu as we speak.