IC

After a very tiring flight (You had to stand two hours or more waiting in line for the cabin-luggage check at Heathrow Airport. I admit I jumped the queue by pretending I was flying business class, so I had to wait only 35 minutes.) I went straight to Nijmegen by train. That city is about 120 km away from the airport, but although the Dutch public transport system is very good (although very expensive) it still takes about two hours to get there. I entered my mother’s room and she was really happy to see me. She is lying in the Intensive care unit, getting oxygen, is connected to heart and blood pressure monitoring equipment and gets various medicines through an IV-drip. She doesn’t talk very much, but she didn’t do that before either. The pain medication she gets to suppress the pain in her paralysed side makes her very drowsy and lethargic. So that part isn’t new.

Overall her situation isn’t that bad though. Apparently yesterday it was much worse, so bad that my sister had called me and I’d decided to take the plane. She was all blue of lack of oxygen because her longs are filled with muck. However currently it looks like she’ll pull through. Until the next heart failure or pneumonia, which could be next week.

I sit next to her bed and read a little, but the very short night I had in the airplane makes me almost fall asleep.