Unstructured interviews - interview extract one

Study Title: Negotiating Midlife: Exploring Subjective Experiences of Ageing

Information about interviewee
Date of birth: 1965
Gender: Female
Marital status: Married
Occupation: Housewife/hairdresser
Geographic region: Wales
Interviewee's name: Janet
Interview ID: Int:005

Interview with Janet

B: Can you tell me about yourself, whatever you like and you can start wherever you like,

J: Well I am a 40, nearly 41 years old. I am a housewife. I’ve got three children I have been married for twenty years. I’ve got, I do a little bit of hairdressing to keep my hand in. but I spend a lot of my time in the house I suppose I like to keep on top of things and that is my, that is my main thing, having three children life is quite busy. I have got a couple of interests, uh I go belly dancing which I thoroughly enjoy. Its more of a social event, you know just to get you out of the house more than anything, but its something, a bit of exercise with a bit of fun attached to it. I am not one for going, I don’t mind going to the gym but I prefer going to aerobics and that sort of thing. It is just no fun to me. It has got to be a bit light hearted then, you know a bit of fun. I can’t say I have got any hobbies as such because I haven’t but life in general just ticks along [laughs] from one week to the next. I was born in Treglar, I am a welsh girl, or I see myself as a welsh girl, my family were born in Treglar so they all originate from there, I was the one who was left out. That’s how I always look at it. I was the one who was born up here. That is my home down there, if we go to visit, as you get to steel works in Treglar and then you have got the mountains that’s when I [gasp/sigh] you know I am home again. I have spent so much time down there as a young girl sort of during the school holidays, I was always not so much shipped off, but my mum was working and you know we used to go down there for six weeks, during the holidays and spend a lot of time with my cousins and you know it is, it is like another home for me and I thoroughly enjoyed it down there. I love it as a place now. But unfortunately my husband won’t up and move, but property is cheaper down there and you know people go on about ooh you know the steel works and all the smell and all the rest of it, but life in general down there is just so different. The children seem to have more opportunities, they have got more about down there for them you know, cinemas on your doorstep and they have got a shopping centre down there which is marvellous you know. When I look at Chinnerton, and I think well we are a big place and we are getting bigger, but the town is just a town, although it is a town it has got a large inside shopping centre and it has got everything there you know, for kids of all age groups and their needs you know and I just think people knock the place but I think they have got far more down there than we have up here, for everybody, but like I said I would, I would like to move down there but I wouldn’t like to leave my mum now really although it is only an hour down the road sort of thing, but I wouldn’t like to go I suppose. Perhaps years ago maybe, or if my mum would say yeah she’d go down there maybe it would be different. No I just think they seem to have more to offer there, but that’s about it really.

B: Your mum…

J: Yeah she is only down the road, so I mean we didn’t move close intentionally, we’d arranged to get married and we were looking for somewhere to live and we were sort of let down with a place and time was running out and so it was a case of either cancel the wedding or my mum and dad suggested that we carried on and got married and we would go and live with them you know for however long until we got ourselves sorted, so Christopher didn’t mind and because they had an extension built on the house, so we had our own bedroom and we had our own sitting room upstairs sort of thing with a settee and tele and that sort of thing, so if we wanted to spend time on our own we could and if we wanted to sit with the family we could do that as well. So that worked very well and we only stayed there six months and that enabled us to save a bit more money anyway and then this place came up on the market and it was I was brought up in a house like this and I am comfortable in a house like this you know, so we were lucky and we had it, so that’s how it really came about. We never sort of said we were going to move far away, it was always going to be in the Chinnerton area and obviously whatever suited our pockets but it was an opportunity too good to miss so that’s how we came to live so close really but like I said not intentionally, but it was like oh god I don’t want to move too far away like, it was like that. But now on hindsight I am glad I haven’t, having lost my dad six years ago and being only just up the road from my mum if she needs us you know so which is always nice.

B: Are you very close to your mum?

J: Yes, yeah I am, I don’t, I don’t say that I see her, I say oh that’s my day to go down and see her. I always see her once a week because I do her hair for her, that’s one visit that I always do, um there is no set day or time for that, it just falls in and just depends on what she’s got on you know, if she’s going somewhere I do it for her, or if I know I have already done it but I know she is going somewhere I will probably do it again so she looks tidy, but I do try and make a social visit in the evening perhaps to go down there. We might sit there, have a natter and have a bottle of wine between us and just catch up on the gen. [general gossip], but she’s a very good friend then. I can say anything to her and she can say anything to me and you know we wouldn’t fall out, if something was said and it was a bit, it would be said and over with and you could get back to normal you know, so yeah we are quite close but like I said we don’t live in one another’s pockets. We are there if we need each other. So if she wants anything doing, if we can help out we do, like Christopher will go and help out and do something for her, my brother in law will that sort of thing. Yeah we keep an eye on her [Laugh].

B: You said you lost your dad six years ago, can you tell me about that time?

J: Um, that was something that wasn’t expected and um a very big shock. [Her son poked his head round the door at this moment]. We were away at the time, only at Butlins we had only gone for a weekend and um to cut a long story short it was mothering Sunday, tried to get hold of my mum, couldn’t you know as the time went on I began to get worried because knowing it was a Sunday she would be there cooking the dinner so I rang their next door neighbour and they told us that they had seen an ambulance outside but could say where it had gone and I was a bit annoyed I suppose really because I thought they had lived next door to my mum and dad for over 30 years and they are very close you know. Again don’t live in one another’s pockets but they are always there if anybody needed, but nobody had gone to see whether it was at my house, my mum’s house then, because they knew my dad had Parkinsons and but he said he would try to find out and he would ask around and would ring me back and he did ring me back and he said yes apparently it had come from our house, which of course my brother in law then rang the hospital A&E and they said yes he was there and we managed to talk to my mum and she said ‘oh he’s all right’, he had fallen, he was having a bath on his own which he is not supposed to do, she had only popped out to get the paper and of course he had fallen and he had got himself wedged between sort of the bath and the radiator and he couldn’t move, so she got a neighbour across the road to help, when she came and of course ended up being there and she was like ‘no he’s fine’, it was only a fall, he has got a bit of a burn on his back you know but he is fine. So we were due to come home the following day anyway so I said shall we come home. There is no need for you to come home she said there is nothing you can do, he is all tucked up in hospital and he is fine and she said you are coming home tomorrow anyway so I said alright then and me and my sister were torn you know didn’t know what to do and I said to him ‘well, she’s saying he’s fine and the kids are enjoying themselves its only one night you know and we will be home tomorrow and there is nothing we can do’ and so we decided to stay and when we went home them we will go straight down to see him and of course by the time we got there she was on pins then she wanted to go down and so when we got there we couldn’t go in so me and my sister popped up into the town and he needed some pyjamas and that so we got some and then when we came back then we went in to see him but she said ‘oh he was fine’ and so we went in to see him and had a bit of shock really, because it wasn’t my dad. You know I thought she’d either, she either was either not looking at reality I suppose, she just didn’t want to see what was there and I was a bit cross then because if we had known he was like that then we would have come back in a minute like you know and um he was very disorientated and he didn’t really know us and he couldn’t drink properly. We had to give him a baby cup to drink out of and he didn’t really have, apart from having a fall, nothing else had happened that they were aware of and you know as the days went on, that was on the Monday and then Tuesday, my mum would go down at 10 o’clock in the morning my husband would come home from work and take her down because she would sit with him all day and do things for him that helped the nurses and he would get agitated if she wasn’t around so um [says goodbye to son] and so Christopher would finish work at half past 4 so he used to come in from work and I used to go straight down and I would sit there then and give him his tea and my mum could go off and have a wander to stretch her legs and whatever you know. But it was so awful because he had this awful vacant look about him you know and you would be feeding him and some of him would seem, he knows its me you know and then some of it would be I don’t think he really knows who it is, does he really want his food and that, we used to try and have a little natter you know, so we sort of sat there and chatted and he said to me, he said ‘I won’t be coming out’ and I said ‘oh you will you know’ and I said ‘its early days yet, you’ve only been in here a couple of days’ I said and he never said anymore then and I came home and rang my brother, because my brother lives back down in Treglar and I thought he needs to come, so I said do you know when you’re coming up and he said he was finishing work on the Friday and bearing in mind that this was a Tuesday and I said, I said ‘you need to come up now, he is not going to be here on Friday’ and he said ‘is he that bad?’ and I said ‘yes he is not dad at all’, so he came straight up and he came up on the Tuesday and then he stayed with my mum and then they went back down on the Wednesday and I had done the same thing because Christopher had taken my mum down then at 10 o’clock and Simon came down on the train then that morning, the following evening, no the evening before sorry, so took them down both together and I had down my thing then and gone down about 5ish and gave him his tea then for them to go and have a wander and my auntie. My dad has only got one sister and his mother is still alive as well and she is now 92 and she had come that afternoon and talked and talked and talked and my auntie is a little bit deaf and she shouts and she talks ten to the dozen and you can’t get a word in if you want to and they, he’d had a very tiring afternoon and he was absolutely exhausted and you could see by his face after they went and so I said to my mum ‘I will give him his tea and you go and have a wander’ and he didn’t eat a lot of tea because he was just so tired and me and my brother got him back into bed then, because he was tired then and he went to sleep and just the three of us were sitting there then and then later on then my sister and her husband called in and I am not sure if she had the children with her or not, just to say hello and I said ‘oh he’s asleep we don’t want to wake him because he is shattered’ so we decided to all come away then because visiting was over anyway and said tata to him but he was still asleep and I said to my mum ‘oh don’t wake him’, it was a shame to wake him and so we all kissed him tata and we come away and then later I had just got up to the bath that night, it was about 12 o’clock and the phone went and it was my sister ringing from the hospital and of course I knew what was coming I just went to pieces and I couldn’t, and Christopher couldn’t take me down because of the children and they all went to bed, and so Trevor drove me down and got my brother but he was dead when we got there and so there was a lot of guilt I suppose really I just wish I had listened to my gut instinct the day before. I didn’t want to come away from there because he was still sleeping. I would have rather waited till he was awake, but I think now you know I think he was unconscious when we left it wasn’t just a sleep, you know and I just wish we had stayed there and my mum said the same thing and she said if you had said to me we could have sat there with him because he was in a room of his own and we could have stayed there and it wouldn’t have mattered to anybody and we would have been there with him when he died he wouldn’t have been on his own, so you know after then there was a lot of ifs and buts you know and if onlys which doesn’t make anything any better does it. We all know that now; just wish we had done things differently. Well, no, it did turn out that after apparently, because perhaps over the last three months previous to that he had been having little blips where he wanted to talk and he couldn’t talk and he didn’t know why you know and we didn’t know why either and it was a case of ‘oh that’s a bit odd’ and it was say 20 minutes or so later he might start to be able to talk again and but I think what had happened, he had some, some problems with his heart and it wasn’t from time to time not pushing the oxygen around enough and this was what was causing these little blips so he was little short bursts then of what do you call it, no oxygen going to the brain, which then led on to him having a heart attack so better to go that way than other way I think, but you know he was still only 67, he was quite young really.

B: How long was he in hospital for?

J: He went in on the Sunday and he died on the Wednesday. So it wasn’t long, and then if you had asked then they didn’t even see it coming either so we couldn’t have been pre-warned or anything like that you know.

B: How has it affected your family?

J: Well, I think we were all shocked you know, just didn’t expect it, but looking back now, because I lost my father-in-law this year and he died of cancer and I practically nursed him right through it and I think how lucky we were to lose my dad the way we did not to have to see him suffer and not be able to do anything about it you know and even my mum said that we were lucky and my brother-in-law’s father died from a heart attack very quick like that and my mum commented to my sister and my brother in law that we were lucky that we lost them like that, not like Christopher’s dad because that was terrible, absolutely awful. I wouldn’t want to see anybody suffer like that you know, but I think that if I was ever diagnosed with anything like that I think I would take an overdose straight away, yeah so. […] I am the only daughter-in-law and my husband has got three sisters and I don’t know really know why but the father-in-law just felt very secure with me and as far as he was concerned I was very efficient and when we on the regular visits to the chemotherapy, I knew what had to be done as far as appointments, pharmacy, this and that not because I was the only one that went, but I went most of the time or probably 99% of the time probably and when only one of the other daughters went and things were never done properly, he had missed an appointment and things like that, which then got him agitated and he was like ‘ooh it should have been done should have been sorted’ and I used to tell her, when she went make sure this is done, you have got to do that and get this appointment and this has all got to be sorted for next time, ‘ok, ok’ like you know, but of course it didn’t get done and that was it then he wouldn’t go with anybody else, he just wanted me to go, but not that I minded going. I would drop everything and go with him, but I just felt that I didn’t want any backlash at any stage ‘ooh I took over’ you know, I didn’t want people to think I was taking over because after all he was my father-in-law, not my father. Not that I wouldn’t do as much for him as I would my own father but um

B: Was there any jealousy or things like that?

J: I don’t know, I think so because I don’t really get on with Christopher’s sisters very well. One of them the older one, we do get on quite well now, she is very much like me, but the other two I don’t [says goodbye to son again], I don’t approve of their lifestyle and things like that and I have been hurt by both of them in sorts of manners and so the youngest sister in particular, I hate her I won’t tolerate her at all, but I think especially with her I think she was jealous of me because I was the blue eyed girl all of a sudden you know and she was the youngest girl and I think she thought she always the blue eyed girl but I wasn’t, I didn’t stop anybody from going but two of them in particular didn’t even go when asked to go with him, you know didn’t want to go with him and I didn’t want to go with him, I didn’t want to go and sit there with him either, but somebody had to go with him and so it ended up being me all the time and you know towards the end I always seemed to be there when he needed somebody and I’d shave him and mop his brow and he was being sick and all of that and all the rest of, of and it didn’t bother me, and I said it doesn’t bother me, don’t worry about that, God that is the least of your problems and you know I always seemed to be on hand if anybody wanted anything it was always me who’d ring so I mean he felt comfortable around me, which I was glad about and in the end he went up the community hospital and I knew he was going in and he wasn’t coming out, even though the palliative care nurse said he was only going in to get this minor problem sorted out but he was going down hill you know, very quickly and the last day I had gone up there in the morning about 10 o’clock taken my mother-in-law up and he wasn’t too bad and then I brought my mother in law home and I stayed up there about 2 hours and then brought my mother in law home, to get a few things and there brought her here to have some tea and then to go back up and in the meantime it was like a changeover you know and my husband stayed up there with his two sisters and you know so when we went back up then the two sisters had gone and it was only me and my husband there and I thought the one sister hadn’t been up there long, she stayed an hour I think, and when I got back in what probably the 2 maybe 3 hours in which we had left there was a big, big deterioration in him and when his other sister came back then the oldest sister and she is a nurse and she could see the same as me and we went outside and we had a natter and I said to her I said I think you ought to ring his sister, she only lives in Monmouth and I said I think you better ring her to come down, ‘yes’ she said ‘it is going to be tonight’, I said ‘yes I think so’, so she said that she was going to stay up there with him and I thought I don’t care if I am treading on anybodies toes, no, I am not being pushed out of this I have seen him through all of it so I said ‘do you mind if I stay with you’, and she said ‘no’, she said that she said ‘you don’t have to’, ‘I know I don’t have to’ I said, ‘but I want to, I have gone this far with him and I am not going to leave him now’, so we sat with him all night and we had we had a dreadful night because if someone had put us in the picture to start with and the one palliative care nurse was very, very nice, but had she had told us what was in store at least we would have been ready for it you know, but he was in a room of his own and that was, they knew that he was dying and um he started and he’d had a very, very minute bit of ice-cream at tea time and he didn’t want anything else, and he said 'oh god I feel really terrible, I feel really poorly' you know and it was ‘oh god’ like you know and then he was sleeping and then waking up but he wasn’t really with it and then of course everybody had gone and his sister had come down to visit, so she came and sat for three hours with us and then they left about 11 o’clock I think it was and then after she had, it was very strange because after she’d left he started vomiting and he, he has, he had bowel cancer and that had gone to the liver and the lungs and by then there was a blockage in the bowel and so everything started coming up, so it was faeces that he was vomiting and urrg it wasn’t so much, that didn’t bother me but I just felt so awful for him you know he kept saying ‘oh god it smells, don’t worry I’ll manage’ you know, but I am not bothered about that you know, but we had to keep lifting him physically up when he wanted to be sick because if he was half laid and half sat he couldn’t get his head up high enough to sit it out, so we had to pull him up to sit him up so he could be sick and it went on and on, it was 3 hours and you could see by, Christopher, Christopher was at home with the children, and I said to him that if he wanted to stay he could because Alexander was 16 and was old enough to stay with the other two and my mum would have come up or whatever and I said if you want to be up here and he said I don’t know whether I do. I said that’s fine, I said I don’t want you to think that I want you at home with the children, if you want to be here, you be here, so he just kept popping up and down through the night, a couple of hours perhaps and then he called in then and his sister had just gone to the loo and at that particular moment his dad wanted to be sick and I couldn’t lift him on my own and I tried and of course he was screaming then because it was starting to hurt his back and so he managed to help me with him then but you could see by him that he didn’t want to be there he didn’t want to see his dad like that which I can understand. So he stayed for a little bit then, then he came back home and you could see the change again and I said to Christopher’s older sister, I said he’s unconscious now, because there was a change, because he was sleeping but he would be twitching you know like this for hours and then all of a sudden he was just still and there was no movement with him at all, and she said ‘yeah he has gone into a coma’, and you know and then she was getting upset and ‘go on dad you can go now’ like, ‘we’ll look after mum’ and all that and she got one of her friends was a nurse on the nightshift from her ward to come in and she said Marlene ‘don’t forget that the hearing is the last thing to go, so don’t say things that you will regret’, and she said ‘oh but I just want him to go now, he’s been through enough’ so then all of a sudden then he started, he was gurgling and we both looked at each other and we didn’t know what on earth that was and like ‘oh my god what is it?’ It sounded like he wanted to be sick but it would come up and we tried to lift him because it looked like he wanted to be sick and he screamed in pain and it was ‘oh what have we done’ like, you know so we managed to sit him back down and then we got on the buzzer and the nurse came in and I can’t remember what she called it, but what it meant that the lungs we starting to fill with fluid [I ask ‘the death rattle?’] yeah something, yeah the lungs had started to fill up with water and that was the noise, the respiration, something like that and I said ‘ooh can’t you do something’ you know but at the same time you didn’t want her to do anything that was prolong things I said ‘if this is it then leave it’, I said ‘how long?’ And she said it could go on for hours and she said ‘I can’t go on listening to that’, it was horrendous and she said I could give him something, inject him with something to dry it up so she did and literally within ten minutes the sound had gone and she was back to as he was but still like unconscious and then it was back to watching the clock and it was how long and it was about 3 hours later and by then it was half past five in the morning and it started again and we were like ‘oh just leave it’, we were saying it can’t be much longer because I was gob smacked that he carried on all through the night you know and it can’t be far away now surely and it just went on and on and he sounded dreadful again and we let the nurse come in again and she said look I can give him something else but I don’t think he has got long but I can give him another injection, so we said yeah and so she gave him another one and things started to settle down very quickly but then his breathing altered and me and Marlene were just sitting there watching him and it was deteriorating and getting slower and more [she makes a deep out breathe sound] you know and I said ‘this is it, isn’t it?’ I had never been with anybody till the end before but you could just tell and she said ‘yes, she said he’s going’ so we both got up and either side [Janet starts to cry a little] and just put our arms around him and sort of told him that we loved him and he just took ooh one almighty breath and he sort of went, or at least we thought he had you know and although Marlene is in nursing and we both sort of looked at one another and ‘is he gone?’ and she was like ‘I don’t know’ and by that time you didn’t want to call anybody else in you didn’t want any, because if it is there like, so of course I went to put my hand on his pulse to try and find a pulse of some kind and with that he sort of just went [she makes a very sudden deep in-breath] like that and he frightened me too, and then that was it, that was the last breath you know and you know it frightened me, and we sort of laughed and cried more or less together because both of us were so taken aback by that and we just more or less lied down with him and just cooched [cuddled] him before we called anyone to come in and left it about ten minutes or so and then I came out and rang Christopher and he came up with his sisters and that and his mum wouldn’t come up, she wanted to remember him how she’d seen him that afternoon and she said that she didn’t want to see him any other way, but to me he was at peace then, you know he wasn’t complaining, he wasn’t in pain and I think it would have been better for her to come up and been with him while he was like that, but she just didn’t want to, she didn’t want to be there with him when he died, and she didn’t want to see him after either so.

B: That must have been terrible to have gone through that

J: Oh, awful like I said it has painted a completely different picture, with some forms of cancer there is light at the end of the tunnel but I think for certain sorts there just isn’t and I think that they should allow them to go with dignity. I really am into this euthanasia you know I think there is something to be said about that.

B: To see it first hand like that

J: My argument is that you wouldn’t let an animal suffer like that, they put them to sleep and when you know, I know that they worry that people might use it willy-nilly but that doesn’t even come into the equation you know. As long as you are under medical supervision and they know that there is no hope that things are going to get worse and once things do start to deteriorate then you should have that choice of go now, because I am sure that if Rodger had had that choice he’d have gone a fortnight before, he wouldn’t have wanted. If he knew now what was going to come he wouldn’t have wanted it like that, no way, it was awful for him to go through it.