Between the Candle and the Dark

A dull, grey, noisy hospital restaurant was the bleak setting for a family conference on the Saturday after the bombshell. My daughter had come back specially from her rehab and  we sat nursing teas and hot chocolate, inching through the form line by line while our friend Celia kept Rosemarie entertained eight floors above us.

Hospital restaurants are strange places, deceptively bland and calm but boiling furiously with contained tragedy and suffering. The staff in uniform having a well deserved break; stressed individuals alone at a table who could be staff on their way to or from work wrestling with intractable issues or lone relatives in a private hell; family clusters superficially polite and cheerful but with giveaway strain lines round the eyes and mouth.

The facts were as inarguable as they had been the previous day and in the end there wasn't much to say. We agreed that any of us could veto a particular care home and no final decision would be made until everybody was entirely sure it was the right option. We stood up with a scraping of chairs and a scratch of trays and headed off on the next stage of this brutal marathon.

When we arrived at Rosemarie's bed she was in fine form, laughing and joking with Celia.

I felt sick.

On Monday I spoke to Alison the Discharge co-ordinator and said we had met up and talked about it and I would come in and sign the form. I think she was surprised that we had done it so quickly because I had initially said I didn't think we would be able to get together until the following weekend when my daughter had finished her rehab.

I met her again on the Wednesday and went through the signature process. The contents of the form had been tweaked and supplemented but not changed in any substantial way. I filled in the box where I could have my say, and signed the form. Alison and the ward doctor Charlie somehow managed to make if feel like a positive action.

She also provided a sheaf of printouts from the internet of care homes that she thought it was worth looking at and a spread sheet listing all the possible ones and the reasons why she hadn't included them. She wouldn't (couldn't) recommend one, and wouldn't even play the game of looking at one for a significantly long time....

We girded our loins and selected four to view over the weekend. I made the necessary calls to make sure we could turn up and look round.

Names will be omitted to protect the guilty.

The first one we visited on the Saturday was very local and had been described by Alison as having a good reputation but looking a bit run down. This proved to be an accurate assessment. The staff were lovely and enthusiastic and showed us a light and airy room that would be Rosemarie's, but the place felt cramped and dowdy, and the pictures and posters on the wall were reminiscent of a primary school. We also asked about the garden and were shown a narrow central courtyard with a couple of benches and a stack of ladders.

We left the place impressed by the staff and relieved that it did not fit the stereotype we had absorbed from sensationalist press reports. We gave it a cautious OK.

The second place blew us away. Clean, modern, slightly clinical, professional and with a feeling or relaxed competence. A relative newbie Receptionist/administrator showed us around with a genial confidence that impressed all of us. When we walked out we agreed that this was the one to beat.

The following day was Mother's Day and it dawned on us that this was probably not the best day to visit care homes. The two scheduled for the day were in Sydenham and had been described to us as lovely buildings (a statement that we hadn't processed thoroughly).

We arrived at the first one. From the outside it looked like a slightly faded grand hotel.

Inside it was awful.

What we wanted was something that looked like a facility that would effect improvement and make a difference. What we didn't want was a terminal ward full of frail old men and women slumped asleep in their chairs with mouths open. This is exactly what we found, in a ghastly setting of chintz wallpaper, anonymous oil paintings and ugly, overstuffed armchairs. We all vetoed it on the way out.

We didn't even go into the fourth place. It was on a main road and most of the windows were overlooking a Quick Fit. Bad vibes oozed from the place and we headed back to the hospital and had a meeting in the restaurant.

The process is not what it seems. In an ideal world you would conduct a leisurely procession round a plentiful supply of candidate homes and compare them in a sober and methodical way. You would revisit a short list and ask more pointed questions and produce a good analytical comparison. You would then retire and debate fine details and finally bestow your judgement and approval on the successful candidate.

If only.

In reality anywhere any good will have a waiting list or, if you are really lucky, a single spare room that could be snapped up while you are driving home from the visit. The dread responsibility of what we were doing dawned blindingly on us. We held in our hands the medical, psychological and emotional future of Rosemarie, and options and opportunities were flickering in and out of existence around us. Her future was a guttering candle in front of us, and we were surrounded by a vast darkness of wrong choices.

We locked worried eyes with each other and talked ourselves into the second one we had seen, which apparently had two spare rooms. Best of three. I just hoped I would not live to regret it.