If you visit a hospital patient and they're asleep, do you leave them sleeping?

 New Year's Eve 2025 and dad has been in hospital since Christmas Day - 6 days, after falling and breaking three ribs. He is 95 and has terminal cancer. He's very frail.

I'd finished work at 1pm and gone straight round to the house. Ant had been taking the chance to tidy his bedroom which he'd not been able to do for many years, due to the level of stuff in the house. As is the case when tidying, while one area is being sorted, the area around it gets a bit cluttered for the duration. Fair enough - you need space to tidy. Ant had covered dad's bed with stuff. 50 years' worth of stuff. He'd unearthed the vacuum cleaner and gone to work with that and so far he had uncovered an old broken tv set, an old broken fan, 2 sets of old, crappy, Christmas lights, a load of old magazines and newspapers, a remote control car, 3 hot water bottles, all crumbling with age and - er - two bags of cement. Yes you read that right.

Ant also pointed out he'd been sleeping on two mattresses - the lower one suspiciously like the horsehair one I'd slept on for forty years. No wonder he'd been complaining of back pain of late. The bed frame, I noticed was an open base iron spring frame, which is probably worth a fortune as scrap value but of very little use as a bed-frame. We'll get that sorted very soon.

My priority today was to get anything obvious and portable out of the house while I had my car so it could be out of the house before dad could find it and have it re-absorbed again. Painfully aware that the social services will be paying a visit, I really needed to prioritise his bedroom - when the paramedics had come to the house on Christmas Day, it was clear the area around his bed would have been the most obvious place to start, however Ant's stuff was there - and Ant was in his element having space to tidy his own bedroom. The stairs would have been next; however Ant had spent the whole day before clearing the stairs and it felt like I was saying his efforts weren't good enough.

I walked around aimlessly asking Ant whether this or that was used on a regular basis or would be missed and Ant kept telling me this, that and the other was used on a regular basis. Despite this, we still ended up with ALL the recycling bins full of relevant items to go out. I took a few bits away like an old tv monitor but we hadn't even scratched the surface. Besides, I hadn't brought my facemask or hazmat suit and was still in my work-clothes so I didn't want to touch anything.

I'd had a plan in my head that big stuff would be dragged out and taken away... HOWEVER - it really isn't that easy. An old mattress which will be heading for the tip needs to be dragged out from under a pile of crap and needs enough space to get it out. The same for Ant's bedframe and spare mattress. We were reluctant to leave too much of a gap as dad would notice and have a hissy fit.

Here's a picture of my childhood bedroom... as it is now NOT how it was then. Note the mattress... How the hell to get that out without everything falling over.

If we thought he wasn't coming back the job would be a billion times easier. Not easy, but easier. In many of those boxes are letters with details of forgotten share accounts and letters referring to the affairs of my late mother who passed in 1994. Some letters dated 2008 - giving you an idea of how his mind works. Letters come in and instead of dealing with them he puts them aside - and they get forgotten and covered with boxes of more letters and stuff and more stuff and more stuff and... you get the picture.

Just so I could feel I'd done something, I took a random box home with me. The box contained letters of importance next to junk mail, Lidl magazines, bus tickets, a Church newsletter from 2021, a flyer for the local hospice, more junk mail, a cheque, uncashed for his car tax refund, a voucher for 30% off a local pub restaurant - expired in 2018, a £10 note, more bus tickets, a council letter attempting to justify their tax rises yet again, seven empty envelopes and an empty envelope with six Aldi receipts in for tomato soup, coffee and eggs.

My guess is you read that list and didn't clock the £10 note. The endless list of mundane crap. It's boring, it puts you in a daze, your mind just tells you to fling it all in the bin. However - the £10 note, was just lying there and the car tax refund cheque for £85, uncashed. Had someone come in with the order to clear the house, then both of those would have not been seen and would have gone straight in the bin. Yes, I hear you say 'so what - if you don't see it, you won't miss it.' You have a point, however that would be literally throwing money away. As the plan is for Ant to live in the house until he's ready to move out, and due to his Autism he isn't able to work, he'll need all the odd £10 notes he can find, and he'll need the money from the uncashed cheque. Who's to say the next box won't contain a couple of £50 notes, or a share certificate, or a sheet of penny black stamps. Trust me - anything is possible. This is why we will be refusing help from anyone who doesn't 'get it'.

This is also why I'll be shooting the nosey-parker-do-gooders, who always surface with their well intended words of ill-informed 'advice'. 'Get a skip' they say - 'just throw it all away'. If it were only that simple, I wouldn't be sitting here now writing this, avoiding going back to the house. Procrastinating. Worrying. Panicking.

It isn't easy.

'Just throw it all away while he's in hospital.' will be the next little gem of 'advice', which no doubt we'll be given shortly by someone who thinks it's obvious.  

The last time I threw stuff away - while he was in hospital, funnily enough, ten years or so ago. I did it so that he'd be able to come back home from the hospital, safely, with room to move about. I've still not heard the end of it. 'Since you threw all my stuff away I still haven't been able to find my worklist/cookbook/egg-timer/peg-bag/corkscrew' etc etc etc. He follows this with 'I know you were only trying to help but it's SO difficult when you move things about.' like all his life problems are my fault. 

I spent SIX WHOLE WEEKS at his damn house back then, when he was in hospital aged 84ish, having fallen from a ladder in the garden and broken a bone in his back. I was there almost every day for at least 5 hours each day, during the school holidays, clearing, sorting and making the house safe enough for him to come home. After a day at the house, most days I took a car-load to the tip, went to visit him and then went home to shower and off to do a 5 hour shift at the call centre. 

He wasn't grateful. He said 'thank you for your help but now I can't find anything; And that thing that was at the bottom of the stairs, I hope you haven't thrown it out and - well it hasn't let up.

This is the exact reason I want to help now but am frozen in the 'what if this bit of paper, container, box is important?'.

I have watched LOADS of cleaning hoarded house videos on You-tube and Facebook and everywhere. They are fabulous but everything literally goes in the skip/dumpster.  It's the ones who still have the hoarder's in situ which show the real issue - the not wanting to let go of ANYTHING. It's not a clean-up service I need, not yet. It's time and a few select people who understand the issue.

With my car boot holding Ant's throw out items, we headed to the hospital for visiting hour.

When we arrived, dad was sat there, attached to all sorts of drips and drains and monitors - fast asleep in his chair. A male nurse was sitting in a chair by the bed - just watching. He explained he had to sit there all the time in case dad awoke and became agitated and tried to rip out his lines again.

I tried to gently wake dad up but I couldn't. I tried many times but to no avail, the few times I tried he looked confused and annoyed. The nurse tried with the same result. We told him not to bother, just let him sleep.

As we were leaving, the nurse came in to sit back down , watching him sleep. Just as we were about to leave, the occupational therapist cornered us - 'Do you have a moment?' Indeed we did.