Debbie's Diary -- Debbie Bennett

2022 was not one of my better years. I think I achieved very little in the grand scheme of things and certainly no writing of any importance at all. My dad's health declined rapidly - we moved through in-home carers, hospital and eventually full-time residential dementia care within the space of a few months from spring to summer; meanwhile my mum's planned sale of their bungalow and moving into a sheltered-housing flat continued and she moved in alone in September. It fell to Andy and I to do a lot of the legwork - interviewing home carers, then finding and inspecting care homes, helping mum to pack and move and all the inevitable bits of DIY that follow any house move. I'm also the proud owner/renter of a secure storage unit for all the stuff of mine and my brother's that used to live in mum & dad's loft space! Since Keith is in Australia and my own loft has a small and awkward hatch, a rental unit seemed like the best option.

So I'm now visiting my dad every couple of weeks as his health declines. And it's made me so much more aware of my own mortality, especially as I've been battling my own demons these past few months.

I've had dental issues since a childhood accident which I don't think I've ever really processed in my head. I've known for a a few years that all the reconstructive bridgework was nearing end-of-life, but this was all brought home to me when my old dentist retired last autumn and I registered at a shiny new and modern local practice. To go along with the cliché and cut the long story short, I had full dental implant surgery at the start of December and it's not been an easy journey. One thing I did realise was that all the videos on the internet are very much geared towards the end-product and it's all smily-faced best thing I ever did stuff. There's nothing that tells you what actually happens and what going through it is actually like. So I blogged it daily for the first couple of weeks and then every week or so afterwards and I'll keep updating it for as long as I feel it's useful. That way, anybody considering the process can get a warts-and-all approach and will know all the things the dentists don't tell you - like how hard it is to learn to eat with teeth that don't have nerves in them to tell your brain how hard to bite and where the food is. Stuff I would have found so useful to read myself.

So I guess I have been writing. Sort of. It's here for anybody who is interested, but be warned, it does contain my X-rays!

Hopefully, my brain will recover enough to get back to some real writing this year. But I'm not sorry to see the back of 2022.