Telephonic Mania
By Mike on Monday 25 February 2008, 20:34 - Journal - Permalink
There have been a few things I could have written about, but the one that
cannot be ignored is dad's latest height of telephone madness.
It started Thursday night and reached its peak the following day. That Friday, I estimate, dad called me over 80 times. Spread over about 12 hours, the calls were coming at an average of about 9 minutes. We will wait to see the evidence of dad's phone bill to find out just how out of his mind with loneliness and worry he was. I know I switched my phone off after about 40 calls, and then received another 37, at least. My mailbox limit is 60 messages, I discovered the following day. Dad had left 59. One was from another person. The calls continued into Saturday and then seemed to have tailed off. There were only a few today. Periodically, it seems I need to do this - to remove the reward to discourage the behaviour. Now I can switch my phone back on again and speak to other people when they call. Dad will be temporarily cured of the habit.
However, I am not the only one on the receiving end. The other family members get calls that drive them insane, too. And so also, does everyone else whose number has been programmed into dad's phone. Possibly as a result of not getting through to me, he has been pressing all the preset buttons and speaking to whoever is at the other end.
One of these people is an elder from the church. I got a message from him, calling from dad's place, saying that dad had been calling him repeatedly. His take on it was that dad was mistakingly calling him in place of me. His unspoken request was to have his number taken out of the phone's memory. Obviously he had had enough calls to get him to drive around to see dad and try to find out what the problem is. Apparently the next-door neighbour has been getting more than a few calls too.
What is it all about? Being lost and lonely.
Some of the calls are just silence, patient breathing, listening, hoping for a voice to come on the line. Others are very abrupt demands for an immediate visit, or a call back. Others are superficially sane-sounding requests for cash or shopping. But it is the last category that are the most difficult to listen to - calls like this:
'Hello?.........hello?..........is there anybody there?..........hello?...........why don't you speak to me?...........I'm all alone here..............I don't know what's going on...............hello?......hello?'
The long listening pauses are filled with anxious breathing, almost a kind of blowing. It is so terribly pathetic and sad-sounding. The value of 'staying in your own home' has all gone.
Well, not for much longer will we have to endure this. It is fairly firm that on Friday 7 March we shall take dad up to his room in the retirement village. Its current occupier needs to die first, or something similar, otherwise we would have dad in there now.
And we will not be giving him a phone.
It started Thursday night and reached its peak the following day. That Friday, I estimate, dad called me over 80 times. Spread over about 12 hours, the calls were coming at an average of about 9 minutes. We will wait to see the evidence of dad's phone bill to find out just how out of his mind with loneliness and worry he was. I know I switched my phone off after about 40 calls, and then received another 37, at least. My mailbox limit is 60 messages, I discovered the following day. Dad had left 59. One was from another person. The calls continued into Saturday and then seemed to have tailed off. There were only a few today. Periodically, it seems I need to do this - to remove the reward to discourage the behaviour. Now I can switch my phone back on again and speak to other people when they call. Dad will be temporarily cured of the habit.
However, I am not the only one on the receiving end. The other family members get calls that drive them insane, too. And so also, does everyone else whose number has been programmed into dad's phone. Possibly as a result of not getting through to me, he has been pressing all the preset buttons and speaking to whoever is at the other end.
One of these people is an elder from the church. I got a message from him, calling from dad's place, saying that dad had been calling him repeatedly. His take on it was that dad was mistakingly calling him in place of me. His unspoken request was to have his number taken out of the phone's memory. Obviously he had had enough calls to get him to drive around to see dad and try to find out what the problem is. Apparently the next-door neighbour has been getting more than a few calls too.
What is it all about? Being lost and lonely.
Some of the calls are just silence, patient breathing, listening, hoping for a voice to come on the line. Others are very abrupt demands for an immediate visit, or a call back. Others are superficially sane-sounding requests for cash or shopping. But it is the last category that are the most difficult to listen to - calls like this:
'Hello?.........hello?..........is there anybody there?..........hello?...........why don't you speak to me?...........I'm all alone here..............I don't know what's going on...............hello?......hello?'
The long listening pauses are filled with anxious breathing, almost a kind of blowing. It is so terribly pathetic and sad-sounding. The value of 'staying in your own home' has all gone.
Well, not for much longer will we have to endure this. It is fairly firm that on Friday 7 March we shall take dad up to his room in the retirement village. Its current occupier needs to die first, or something similar, otherwise we would have dad in there now.
And we will not be giving him a phone.
Comments
Gosh, I think you will be relieved when your Dad's room becomes available. Hopefully, your Dad will be in a much better position with people around him and to have his meals prepared at proper intervals. Will your parents be sharing their meals in the same dining room? He sounds very confused and very lonely. Is it not possible for your parents to share a room in the nursing home, or would that be a recipe for disaster? In the meantime, hang in there and the best of luck.