Well it was a stroke.

And she still has not recovered any sight in her right eye. The whole area around that eye is very painful to her. When she lies down you think you can see a difference in the texture of the skin around her right eye, and when she looks tired, but when she's smiling and sitting up there is no difference. The eyeball itself looks a little red around the edges but I can't decide if the iris and pupil are still the same. Certainly her left eye was dilated.

We went in to see her and timed our arrival with my brother and his wife to perfection but in an unplanned manner. Three visitors per patient at any one time, so we all went in and had a bit of a chat, then Mr W and I stayed and they went off to get tissues (her right eye was weeping and the hospital issue tissues were very scratchy).

We got out the goody bag we had taken in (Tisserand lavender hand cream that she loves, a warm pink pashmina, some slippers that Nona had knitted for me) and she looked a bit happier with slippers and a warm scarf on. We chatted for a while and then went downstairs to find the others - again timing our arrival with sibling such that we bumped into them on the stairs. My dad came down to the coffee area to join us after a brief while and told us everything that had happened; as it had happened; since it happened. I already knew all of this from my father and brother, but Mr W was still piecing the chronology together from bits I probably didn't explain too well. We went back up and made a list of what should be brought in to make my mum more comfortable in the night. A personal radio, CD player, various CDs (Rachmaninov, Debussy, Chopin and Enya), Elizabether Arden Eight Hour Lip Balm, Garfield, some ear plugs and her glasses. My dad and brother disappeared home to pick up the bits they had, and Mr W and I stayed there. Explaining that everyone feels de-personalised in a hospital and that it's not just because she has had a stroke. Everyone gets walked to the loo in case they fall and sue, and because they have so many patients sometimes they don't ask you if you want your pills they just give them to you, and that none of this is because they see her on the slippery slope to dementia and senility (her words I think).

We talked about the fact she'd not known it was Friday yesterday when the doc asked after it happened (about 1045). We didn't think it was that big of a deal - she hadn't got a newspaper yet and would have no reason (being retired and having just finished marking A'level papers) to know whether it was Thursday or Friday. We discussed how everyone knows World War II started in 1919 (because Germany was never going to tolerate the Versailles treaties entered into that year) and those other questions that TV and radi docs ask stroke patients. We put some hand cream on.

She seems fine in her head but very wary of herself - she's constantly running lists of children or teachers' names through her head and making sure she can remember her 2002 registration group. Her eye bugs her because she can't pour her own drinks as her depth perception is shot. Still, she told me she's still going to see Madame Butterfly this week.