Surrounded by Love (Part 1)

 Doreen Tiffany
21/11/32 - 18/03/14

Sunday 16th March, will be etched in my mind forever. We were on a high after the previous days 'A Day in His Presence' event and had gone out for a quiet lunch in Bristol, when I received a call during  lunch from my older brother (David) to say that mum had been rushed into hospital early
that morning, but she seemed fine and they were just doing lots of tests. He said not to worry, as it would take a couple of days to do the tests and to get the results. Later that evening, I got a call from my younger brother (Michael/Rev Tiff) in Taunton to say that he'd had a call from our sister (Helen), who was at the hospital and had been told by a consultant that mum only had a very short time left to live and that they recommended that any family living away should think of travelling home to see her.

While I was calling Nancy to let her know that we were going to travel up North, Ruth was on the
phone to our ngm colleague and great friend Jill, who agreed to move into our flat while we were away (in our role as caretakers, we have to ensure that someone is on site overnight at all times).  Next we called Rachel and Josh to let them know what had happened, they both said that they wanted to go up as well, so Josh started looking at train times from London.

To make things a little more complicated, our car was booked in for a service and it's MOT at the garage in Kidderminster who've looked after our car for years. Lonnie was off shift on the Monday & Tuesday, so he said we could drop the car off with him and take his car and he would take ours to the garage for us.

So we arranged for my brother Michael to drive up from Taunton to us and then at about 10:30pm, we all left Thornbury in our car and drove to Kidderminster to swap cars. Rachel joined us and we finally got on the road again just before mid-night. Thankfully the roads were clear and we made
good time, arriving in Sherburn at about 2:30 to stay at mums flat. We didn't get much sleep (I tried
to sleep in an arm chair - not to be advised!) and were all up early to call the hospital. They reported she'd had a reasonable night and they said we could go in anytime, there were no visiting restrictions
for us.

We had a quick coffee and hit the road again, heading into York hospital and quickly found our way on to the ward and found mum in good spirits. Ruth went out to meet Josh at the station.

To be continued.