I wrote a post in November about Oma.  She had cancer and I had been told it was unlikely she’d see Christmas.  She turned 95 years old on Christmas eve, though Andrew and I couldn’t make it down to see her.  She seemed to linger on and we had plans to see her the first weekend in April when we went to Melbourne to celebrate Andrew’s dad’s 60th birthday.

Oma had gone to hospital a while ago now to learn how to use some equipment (oxygen etc) before being back at home with it, but she deteriorated and wasn’t able to go home.  There was some talk about where she should go, because she couldn’t stay indefiniately at the hospital she was in.  My parents went to visit her on the weekend, and Sunday night I got a call from mum telling me that Oma had really deteriorated even between when they saw her on Saturday and again on Sunday.  It sounded like it wasn’t certain she would survive the night, but Andrew and I decided that Nathan and I should fly to Melbourne to go and see her, hoping she would be still with us and lucid today.

Nathan was dragged from his cot at 9:15 pm and Andrew took us to the airport to catch our 10:20 pm flight.  We took the carseat with us so that mum and dad could collect us from the airport at midnight.  Nathan had a fantastic flight…he didn’t manage to go back to sleep after he woke (at the airport), and spent the flight smiling at everyone around him and playing peek-a-boo with the people in the seat behind us.

Nathan finally fell asleep in the car on the way to Oma’s house where I was going to stay with mum and dad, and woke up 8 hours later.  We went to visit Oma in the morning but didn’t manage to spend much time with her as she was seeing doctors and was also being moved to her own room.  Oma was pretty surprised to see us, though!

We went back after lunch, and Nathan was reasonably happy even though he’d had practically no sleep all morning.  We read a book to him (Horns to Toes and inbetween) and got Nathan to show Oma his hands, feet, nose, ears, how he was able to shut his eyes, and where his belly button is.  Oma said that Nathan was “a cutie”.  I’m sure she was happy to see him.  He went to sleep pretty soon afterwards and slept for an hour and a half.  By the time he woke up, Oma was dozing and very difficult to rouse, a fact that we put down to the morphine she was getting.

We went home, got some dinner from a local Thai restaurant, and I had just managed to get Nathan to sleep soon after 9 pm after a marathon effort to get him to sleep when Bruno rang the doorbell.  He told Dad that the hospital had rung and said that they didn’t think that Oma would survive the night.  Mum and Dad went to the hospital, while I decided to stay so that Nathan could have a decent sleep.

So while I was sitting here on my own I looked back to read the last blog entry I wrote about Oma.  The photos show her so much healthier looking than she was today, even though she was quite sick with cancer.  I’m so pleased that we have those photos, and I’m pleased that we have photos of Oma and Nathan when he was only a couple of months old.  I’m almost glad I don’t have any photos from today, since it’s not how I want to remember Oma.

There’s absolutely no point to this entry, just wanted to write it down.

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