Tricky Times

Prior to the hand in of my coursework for the May deadline I experienced a few issues that meant I was a bit busier and under some stress. I could have asked for an extension but felt that I would be able to get it sorted in good time, owing to the fact that I’d been pretty well organised in the run up to the end of the academic year.

In mid-April I had just returned from a trip with my wife to Venice, Italy and on the night before travelling back home I had a message that my brother was on the phone to the doctor and awaiting an ambulance to visit our Mum who had been taken ill. She was producing blood in her urine and was having some sharp pains in the right side of her chest. Not unusual and previously it was documented as a gall bladder infection, then treated by antibiotics. A recent visit by her doctor meant that they wanted her to go in for a scan on her gall bladder but this took second priority after they diagnosed her with an infection.

Upon getting home and having the next day booked off work I headed up to the hospital where she was being cared for. There were a few issues with the people in the ward, one being really gobby and causing havoc for the staff whilst another was just miserable all of the time. Another lady was lovely and was able to help us understand mum’s progress when the nurses were not around.

Mum had MS for the last 40ish years of her life and in the end her memory was not what it used to be so it was tricky trying to find out info from her about the treatment she was having. People talked to her and assumed she was able to understand and remember the facts. In actual fact her hearing was terrible and then her memory would ensure that anything she heard was soon forgotten anyway.

Man Down

She was in there for the rest of April and we kept visiting her every day, but nothing they did seemed to have a lasting effect on her. She improved slightly then tailed off again. Then during the last week of April I was taken ill too. I had been to work on a sort of night shift to cover some work taking place overnight and felt really cold at around 10pm, shivering and quivering until about 1am when the guys left so I pedalled home on my bike in the pouring rain at 1:30am. I was freezing cold and shaking when I got into bed. The next day I was up for the night job again and felt even worse this time I was shaking and chattering my teeth, so much so that i even had a coffee from the coffee vending machine, something I would never normally do. I got home at around 2:30am on Wednesday morning with the plan to go back in that night, but I was in no fit state to go to work. I rang in sick and then stayed in bed to try and catch up with some getting better time.

This didn’t seem to work too well, and I was unable to sleep soundly, was sweating profusely, running a temperature and I started being unable to keep food and drink down, even water. With a worsening state, my wife took me up to A&E and then after a quick blood test to check infection markers they immediately told me I would be admitted. My infection markers, which should be between 0 and 15, came back at 326. I was dehydrated and therefore attached to a drip of fluid and also antibiotics.

I was taken into the “Fit to Sit” ward which according to the NHS is defined as :

“In an NHS Emergency Department, the “Fit to Sit” concept refers to a designated area for patients who don’t require continuous monitoring and are able to sit in a chair rather than wait on a trolley. “

Whilst in this area I was permanently fixed to drips and taken back and forth for scans, x-rays and other blood tests. I was in here for around three days, stuck in a chair. I was unable to sleep as there were countless churn of other patients coming through the department. The chairs were not comfortable and even the reclining seats were no good for me, I had to give my chair up to some people who were worse off than me too. My temperature had been up at over 39°C but would soon start dropping once the antibiotics were working.

Without going into too much more detail, I would say that this three day period is likely the worst time of my life. By the time I was taken to an escalation ward I was hallucinating ad tripping out. When I eventually got to sleep on a trolley bed, it was the best sleep I’d ever had, but I woke up in a messed up state and the calendar said I’d lost an extra day. Surely I hadn’t slept that long, what had happened? The nurse, seeing my confusion explained that the clock was just set incorrectly. Thank f*** for that.

I was in a daze and confused, then I started thinking about how Mum and Dad coped with this sort of thing every time they have been in hospital. Dad died a couple of years ago so he no longer had this trouble but Mum was in the ward upstairs from where I was now laid out.

I was admitted properly to a ward after another day and then spent three further nights and days on drips of antibiotics before they allowed me to be discharged. There was no information as to why this infection had gotten so bad or indeed where it had come from.

All the time I was under the care of the doctors and nurses I was aware that Mum was upstairs fighting for her life.

Five days after my discharge the consultant looking after Mum phoned and said that it was time to stop treating her and let her fade away comfortably. My brothers and I discussed it and we got together to work out plans on how we’d be around for mum. A few days later she succumbed to the infection and died in the hospital bed that me and my brothers had stayed by. In the last day or so, the staff had brought in a dome light that produced RGB LED colours in a cycle and this is to stimulate the person who is slowly winding down to their last breath. I found this a bit weird but noticed that the colours in the room were changing depending on the colour coming from the lamp.

It was a tricky time for the whole family and she is missed by many people. The funeral took place in early June at the local crematorium and the service was lovely too. We had a wake at the Peacock pub that didn’t seem to get as boozy as Dad’s in 2023.

Why?

Why am I mentioning this now? Because I was taking photographs all throughout the experiences of the few weeks. Why was I taking photographs? Because I wanted to remember details and make visual notes for some reason, maybe for a future project?

I took pictures of Mum and Dad regularly whenever they were in hospital as it was a reminder of the times that they had been in what their treatment had been and their triumphant exits, even their departure from home in the ambulance a few times heading into hospital.

I take pictures of many things, but since I started getting interested in art and photography about 10 years ago, and with my University degree getting more serious every year, I figure that these experiences are all valuable life experiences. If I can remember them accurately it will make it easier to work it all out.

During the last hours of Mum’s life I was making photos of her and the surroundings, even after she’d died I was capturing images of her now lifeless body. This is similar to how I used my camera when Dad died in 2023, I was also engaged in taking pictures to document the times before during and after the death.

For Mum and Dad both, I also took my camera to the funerals. Not my big Canon DSLR but a mirrorless point and shoot. I was careful to be respectful and not upset other people paying their respects, but Mum and Dad knew and understood my fascination with photography and allowed me to capture images in their happiest and most vulnerable times. Images in my library include Dad with the xray showing behind him of his broken arm after rolling his mobility scooter, him undergoing ultrasound scans on his heart and lungs, Mum in the back of an ambulance, her catheter leg bag red with blood in her urine and now images of both of them in their last moments and afterwards in the bed and at their funerals.

It might come across as cold and disrespectful but to me it’s the opposite, I want to remember them as they were through life, the fun and the upset altogether. Life isn’t perfect and there are many ups and downs, with the one certain outcome that is guaranteed. I was also taking pictures of my first experience being admitted to hospital in a poor way, the only times I’d been in hospital for myself were before I was really interested in photography, so there was only the odd phone image.

I’ve previously struggled to call myself an artist, but with my photography I think i’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I am an artist. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a poet either but it seems that for some of the biggest events that have occurred in my life I have been writing poetry, and collected on the computer

The poem to accompany Mum’s death is here:

Sentinels Once More

Conclusion

Please don’t get me wrong, I do not take photos of the bad stuff only. I love takign photos of the times when everyone is getting together to have fun, and have been responsible for capturing some wonderful memories on SD Card in the past that we look back on today and marvel at.

I’m not a “grief hound” and am quite practical and pragmatic when it comes to talking about death and illness so these subjects do not phase me that much.

I wonder if this is a process I use to make sense of the world, or am I preparing for future work or projects by capturing a breadth of images today?

I will continue to make photographs and then decide what I should do with them in the future.

This post is to capture the difficult times we experienced in April, May and June of 2025 and how it all ended up with my work being handed in on time for Uni, a handover to a new job, a family death, adn a family illness. It was a pretty dodgy first half of a year.