Page 6 of Together Again at the Cornish Country Hospital

Gwen was bone tired and all she wanted to do was flop on to the sofa and watch TV, but she couldn’t. She was hosting a get together for the Mrs Adventures club after work. It was one of the groups she’d started since retiring and she usually loved getting together with the other women. Sometimes they’d catch up just to chat and talk about their lives, the good bits, the bad bits, and everything in between. At other times they’d get together for a specific event, or to plan their next adventure, hence the name of the group. So far there’d been zorbing, clay pigeon shooting, quad biking and even a tandem handglide with qualified instructors. It was a rebellion of sorts, and proof that just because you were a woman of a certain age the adventures didn’t have to stop.

Tonight there was no specific agenda for the meeting, but they were overdue another adventure. Normally by now she would have planned one; she often had the next idea brewing even before they’d completed the latest one. Right now, she couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm and it had crossed her mind to cancel the get together, but she couldn’t do that. It wasn’t because her friends would have held it against her. They’d probably have been happy to meet elsewhere, or just to give the meeting a miss this time. The reason she couldn’t cancel had nothing to do with letting them down, it was because she was scared. If she started pulling out of things it would become a slippery slope. She already felt as though she’d lost her zest for life and it terrified her.

That sort of apathy had plagued her once before, and it had terrified her then too. She’d been convinced it was a sign of the illness she dreaded, the illness that had robbed her mother of who she was, before eventually robbing her of her life too. Alys Evans had been a power house, who’d had six children including Gwen, and had run a sheep farm with her husband, Ivor, a few miles outside Porthmadog. Growing up in Wales had been idyllic for Gwen, but when Barry’s job had taken him and Gwen to Cornwall, it had become their adopted home and these days she considered herself a proud Cornishwoman, not even her accent gave her away.

Despite her love for her adopted home, Gwen had missed Wales, and her siblings, but most of all her mum and dad. There’d been a couple of times she’d even considered moving back. The first had been when Gwen had become a mother herself, and had felt the draw to be back near her own mum, leaning on her for support, particularly in the early months when she’d felt lonely and isolated. But Gwen had done what she always did, taking matters into her own hands and starting up a mother and toddler group, long before every village had one of its own. The second time she’d felt the pull to go home, had been when her father had died, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Alys had been fifty-five years old when she’d lost her husband, who’d been ten years older than she was. She’d stated her intention to continue running the farm, and had brushed away the concerns of her children. Gwen’s eldest brother, Rhodri, had offered to join their mother on the farm full time and Gwen’s misgivings had begun to fade. There were three hundred miles between Porthmadog and Port Kara, and, with a young family, Gwen didn’t manage to get back to the farm nearly as often as she would have liked. By the time her mother’s fifty-seventh birthday came around, it had been almost six months since they’d seen one another.

‘Mam seems to be ageing fast these days.’ Rhodri’s warning on the phone before Gwen arrived for her visit should have prepared her for what she saw on her return to Wales, but it didn’t. Alys was barely recognisable as the feisty force of nature she had always been and, when she’d turned to look at Gwen and the grandchildren, for one terrifying moment Gwen had thought her own mother didn’t recognise her. Then Alys had suddenly given a physical jolt of recognition. Despite Gwen’s initial relief, the changes in her mother were evident; she seemed to be struggling with how to phrase things, and had developed repetitive patterns of behaviour, which included folding and refolding the stack of tea towels she kept under the sink hundreds of times during Gwen’s visit.

Gwen’s youngest sister, Elena, had moved in by then to help Rhodri out. She’d told Gwen that Alys’s GP had dismissed her behaviours as symptoms of ‘the change’, but had confided her fear that things seemed to be getting worse, even though she should have gone through the menopause by now. Much to Alys’s displeasure, Gwen and her sister had insisted on taking their mother to the doctors again. There’d been a series of tests and some dead ends, before Alys had finally been diagnosed with primary progress aphasia, a form of dementia that eventually left her a shell of the woman she’d once been.

Barry had supported Gwen’s decision to return to Porthmadog to help care for her mother, but Elena and Rhodri wouldn’t hear of it, telling Gwen that nothing had made Alys prouder than the success of her daughter’s career as a midwife. Instead, she’d visited as often as she could, and had used all her holiday allowance to stay at the farm and provide respite so that her sister and Rhodri could take a break. It was almost five years to the day of diagnosis that Alys had succumbed to her illness. She’d been sixty-two when she’d died and Gwen hadn’t been sure whether she’d feel anything at all when she finally lost her mum, because she’d already been grieving her for years. To her surprise, a wave of devastation had hit her harder than she’d ever have imagined possible and for a while her grief seemed to swallow her whole. She wasn’t just grieving for the loss of her mother, she was grieving for the loss of those final years, when Alys had no longer been Alys, and for everything the family had been robbed of as a result.

When Gwen had started to struggle with her memory in her early fifties, and had found herself trying to grasp words that felt fully formed in her brain, but which for some reason wouldn’t come out of her mouth, she’d been devastated all over again, convinced she was about to receive the same diagnosis as her mother. When tests had revealed that in her case the symptoms really had been down to the menopause, Gwen’s whole body had flooded with relief. She’d had a horrible couple of years, but it had been manageable, knowing that it would pass, and she’d been convinced that she’d escaped the possibility of inheriting her mother’s condition. Except in the last few weeks, the words of the consultant she’d seen back then seemed to be ringing in her ears.

‘Having a parent with primary progressive aphasia does make it more likely that you’ll inherit the disease.’

Gwen couldn’t blame the symptoms she’d been experiencing lately on menopause, and she’d been too afraid to even google them. A voice inside her head had kept up a running commentary instead, telling her that she didn’t need tests, she knew what this was, and that no one could expect a lucky escape twice over. There was no denying the symptoms either. She seemed to lose her train of thought at times, her motivation and energy levels had fallen through the floor and sometimes she struggled to focus on what other people were saying. She just didn’t feel like herself any more, but she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else realising, so she put on an act of being the same old Gwen. She might be laughing and joking the way she always had, but on the inside it was as though something had already died, her joie de vivre snuffed out like the flame on a candle.

Thankfully no one at the Mrs Adventures club seemed to have realised that Gwen was there in body alone. There’d been animated chat between the rest of the group, and Gwen had thrown in a few of her usual one liners. She’d laughed when everyone else did, and made sure she kept the drinks flowing. She just wasn’t feeling any of the things she usually felt during a night in with the girls, and it was almost as if she was watching herself from above, rather than actually being there.

‘My cousin who lives in Kent is doing a wing walk to raise money for her local hospital and I was wondering if that could be our next adventure?’ Caroline was the mother of one of the A&E nurses at St Piran’s, Esther, and she and Gwen had become good friends over the past couple of years, especially since she’d started volunteering in the hospital shop.

‘Exactly how sturdy are these wings?’ Frankie, Gwen’s best friend, who was also a midwife, raised her eyebrows. ‘When I went into the village shop last night, all of the drinks in the refrigerator cabinet started rattling when I stomped past. It was like I was creating my own reading on the Richter scale.’

‘Oh shut up.’ Wendy laughed as she gave Frankie a gentle nudge in the ribs. ‘As a member of staff, I know I should support the idea of raising money for the hospital, but I’m about to marry the love of my life after more than two decades of living with a total knob. So can we at least wait until after the wedding?’

‘Good idea.’ Connie nodded. She’d been a patient at the hospital when Gwen had first met her, and she’d made a remarkable recovery after a serious accident, but it turned out she was still willing to play up her injuries when it suited her. ‘I’m just not quite sure I’ve got the strength for something like that any more. Not after the accident.’

‘I’m not sure I’ve got the right pants for it.’ Frankie wrinkled her nose. ‘I have problems holding on to the contents of my bladder if I drive round a corner too fast.’

For the first time that evening, Gwen’s laughter was genuine and the conversation quickly derailed into an exchange of experiences about just how much of challenge it was to be a woman of a certain age.

‘I should probably have done more pelvic floor exercises after I had Esther.’ Caroline lowered her voice as she shared the hushed confession. ‘But I remember trying to do them one day when I was sitting on the bus, just like my midwife had advised. Ten minutes into the journey, the bus suddenly pulled over and the driver shot upstairs. He’d seen me in the mirror up there, you know the one they use to keep an eye on the passengers, and he thought I was having a funny turn because of the pained expression on my face. Turns out I can’t clench anythingdown there, without clenching the muscles in my face too!’

‘I bet Gwen knows some techniques.’ Wendy looked in her direction.

‘I think I might have left it a bit too late.’ Caroline frowned, but Gwen shook her head.

‘It’s never too late. I helped a patient once whose pelvic floor was so far gone, she almost turned her daughter’s birthday trip to a trampoline park into a pool party.’ Everyone was laughing so much by then, that they wouldn’t have heard the technique Gwen recommended, even if she’d tried to share it with them. It felt so good to just laugh with her friends, and forget about the nagging voice in her head for a little while.

‘Did you have a good night?’ Barry came up behind her as she stood in the kitchen once the others had left, and slid his arms around her waist. ‘I could hear you all laughing from upstairs.’

‘Probably best not to ask what about.’ She smiled, leaning back into him and feeling better than she had in weeks. Maybe she really had just been tired, and all she’d needed was a night in with the girls to pep her up.

‘Any gossip you can pass on?’ Barry’s tone was teasing and she turned around in the circle of his arms so they were face to face.

‘Not gossip exactly, but Wendy has worked out where she wants to go on…’ The next word had been on the tip of Gwen’s tongue, ready to spill out of her mouth, but now it felt like a rock wedged in her throat. She could picture the image of what she wanted to say, see it so clearly, a red bridge and an island in the distance, but it was like the connection between her brain and her voice had suddenly snapped.

‘On your next adventure?’ There was concern on Barry’s face as he watched Gwen, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, but she was shaking her head.

‘It’s where you go on an aeroplane. You know, after there’s a wedding.’ Panic was washing over Gwen now and her eyes filled with tears as she looked at Barry again.

‘A honeymoon?’ She tried to nod in response, but the tears were rolling down her cheeks. How could she have forgotten the words to tell Barry that Wendy wanted to go to San Franciso on her honeymoon?

‘It’s okay darling, it’s okay.’ As he pulled her closer, her heartbeat thudded in her ears, but it still didn’t drown out the voice that was back, telling her she could no longer deny it. If she couldn’t even conjure up a simple word like honeymoon, there had to be something seriously wrong, and she was terrified the aphasia that had so cruelly taken her mother wasn’t going to let her get away a second time.

7

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