She goes in on Thursday for a planned operation. Beyond pyjamas, what do I actually take in with her?

#1Lorna B.(Joined Feb 2026 · 8 posts)June 11, 2026, 9:04 pm

First planned admission since I took this on, and I have spent the evening packing a bag and then unpacking it again because I have no idea what I am doing.

Nightdresses, obviously. Toothbrush. A book she will not read. Beyond that I am guessing. My sister says take nothing valuable and let the hospital deal with the rest, which sounds sensible until you remember that she cannot manage her own hearing aid batteries and has not been able to for about a year.

She is 79, four nights expected, nothing dramatic. What I am really asking, I think, is whether there is a version of this where I have done something useful rather than just sat there for four days feeling like a spare part. Is there?

#2tomsdaughter(Joined Jan 2025 · 31 posts)June 11, 2026, 10:47 pm

Glasses. Hearing aids AND spare batteries. Dentures and the pot. Whatever she walks with, labelled with her name in permanent marker.

That is the whole list that matters. Everything else is comfort.

#3ron-at-home(Joined Aug 2025 · 17 posts)June 12, 2026, 8:33 am

Seconding the marker pen, and I say that as the man who lost a walking frame and a set of dentures on the same admission. The frame turned up in another bay. The dentures did not, and he ate soft food for six weeks while a new set was made, which affected him more than the operation had.

One thing I would add that is not in a bag. Ring the ward on the second morning rather than waiting for them to ring you, and ask for the nurse looking after him rather than whoever picks up. It is a small thing and it changed how much I got told for the whole of the rest of that stay.

#4Maura KinsellaAdmin(Joined Sep 2024 · 168 posts)June 12, 2026, 11:26 am

There is very much a useful version, and it is not sitting there. It is two jobs, and one of them takes ten minutes at the kitchen table tonight.

The first is the bag, and everyone above has already given you the right list, so I will only say why those four things sit at the top of it rather than the pyjamas. Glasses, hearing aids, dentures and whatever she walks with are not comforts, they are the equipment she uses to take part in her own care. A woman who cannot hear the question, cannot see who is asking, cannot chew what arrives and cannot get to the toilet on her own is a different patient from the one you dropped off, and the difference tends to get written down as her condition rather than as a missing bag. I learned that with my mother's glasses on her readmission, when two days of not being able to read the menu card got recorded as her being vague.

The second job is the page. One side of A4, handed to the nurse in charge on the day and not left in the locker, because the locker is where paper goes to be ignored. What goes on it: what she is normally like, which means whether she knows the day, how far she walks and with what, and what she does for herself at home. Everything she takes, including anything she buys herself at the chemist. What she will not tell them, which for most women of that generation is pain, and the fact that she will say she is fine to a doctor because she was raised to. What settles her and what frightens her. Then your name, your relationship, and a phone number that gets answered.

That page is worth more than anything else you will do that week, and there is guidance behind it rather than just my opinion. NICE and SCIE guideline NG27 tells hospital and community teams to recognise the value of carers and families as an important source of knowledge about the person's life and needs. You are not being a nuisance by handing it over. You are supplying the thing the ward does not have and cannot get anywhere else.

Two more, since you have a few days. Ask her, while she is well and in front of a nurse if you can manage it, to say out loud that she is happy for you to be told things, and ask for that and your number to go in the notes. It takes a minute on a good day and is impossible on a bad one. And on about day two, ask who is coordinating the discharge. NG27 requires a single named practitioner to be responsible for it and to be the central point of contact for the person and their family, and four nights goes very fast if nobody starts that conversation until somebody mentions a date.

When they go into hospital has all of this set out properly, including why people often come out weaker than they went in, and coming home from hospital is the other end of it.

#5K. McAllister(Joined Nov 2025 · 11 posts)June 14, 2026, 4:12 pm

The one page thing works and I would not have believed it until I did it.

Ours went in with a typed sheet, my mother's normal routine on one side and the medicines on the other, and a nurse actually photocopied it. Two different doctors referred to it in front of me. Before that I had spent three admissions repeating the same information to a new person every shift and getting slightly less accurate each time because I was tired.

Where I would push back slightly on this thread is the assumption that the ward will use it. Mine did. A friend's did not, and hers went in the bin with the flowers. It costs you ten minutes either way, so do it, but do not take it as an insult if nobody reads it.

#6Lorna B.(Joined Feb 2026 · 8 posts)June 22, 2026, 7:55 pm

Home on Monday, five nights not four.

The page got taken seriously, which I honestly did not expect. What I did not expect at all was that the most useful line on it turned out to be the one about her saying she is fine, because a physio told me on the third day that she had been telling them she manages the stairs at home unaided. She has not managed the stairs unaided since February. That got corrected because it was written down in front of them.

Hearing aids came home. Glasses came home. One slipper did not, which after reading this thread feels like getting off lightly.