Eggs on toast under threat.

The ninety-five-year-old does little cooking now, a notable exception her ever favourite supper. She fries two eggs, toasts two slices of bread, and enjoys eggs on toast surrounded by memory's ghosts, seated politely in empty chairs around her like Dickens’ semi-formed characters from A Christmas Carol.

As she ascended the mountainous nineties, Edmund Hillary-like, she occasionally forgot to take her daily medications, suffering some kind of oxygen deprivation, ditto. The family, meaning my sister and I, appointed one of these franchise nurses, to visit and administer medication, nineteen pills morning and night. 

The health franchise company soon decided that the ninety-five-year-old was at risk of also forgetting other things. Other things included turning off the gas after cooking eggs on toast. 

The message (received) read:  we recommend you cut off your mother’s gas supply. This measure will mitigate the risk of gas explosion.

The doctor disagreed. (The health ‘industry’ no longer includes actual doctors.) She argued that staying in the home in which she was married and raised seven children does more to prolong her life than any other factor. But the health industry's bureaucrats have elevated themselves above mere doctors, whom they see as mere body mechanics and signers of death certificates. What would a doctor know, they scowl, eye-rollingly.

The franchise nurse organisation defensively clarified that the occupational health and safety of its own workers in entering into a home where gas may potentially be switched on without flame were the driving force behind its decision to advise cutting off an essential service to a ninety-five-year-old.

Dealing with a ninety-five-year-old with one foot in the church is a dream compared to coping with bureaucracy.