TWO CARERS WALK INTO A BAR.

Every day, two carers walk in here in the morning. Two walk in at night. Sometimes, one of those carers is pulling in extra work. That carer comes in twice a day. Rare, but it happens. Carers wish me good morning at night and good night in the morning.
   They work on a four-day cycle, and can almost always tell you which day it is. Day One. But they struggle to know that it is Tuesday. Days blur. Four on and four off. Barring illness, holidays, or nonsensical last-minute redeployment to another part of the system, that is.
   You meet everyone in the system eventually. Regulars are regulars until everything changes. Now and again, someone – who moved away through the different layers of the system – someone comes back. Not in an undead kind of way. Night of the Living Carers.
   Anyway. One familiar ex-regular comes back in. She’s known as the Poster Girl for Overtime. If she’s asked, she’ll do it. And, of course, she’s in the house to cover for someone else. Taking a bit of overtime. I once joked that she’d end up covering her own shift as overtime.
   Oh, how we laughed.
   And then she declared a holiday. Except that she turned up on her day off and covered her own shift. So my joke was a prediction just waiting to be fulfilled. Well, anyway, she turned up and just wanted to know. Someone gave her a book on dementia. She wondered if I’d written it, knowing that the book I’d written was done under another identity. To protect my mother’s privacy, you understand.
   I explained the situation. No. Okay, but could the carer have the details of my book? Just out of curiosity. Certainly. With the warning. Having met me, interacted with me, the carer is barred from reviewing the book. Other than that, we’re okay.
   Well now the news is travelling around the carer circuit. It wasn’t, before. Carers knew I’d written a book on dementia, but no one asked for the details. Some of them went looking for me on Amazon, generally, but I pointed out that bit about protecting the identity of someone who is at the most vulnerable state you can have in life.
   I have responsibilities way beyond ordering pills and grinding them.
   Now the thing about the book…and I had to explain this…is that it isn’t about dementia care. It’s about the last bus journey I take before I must become a carer. After that, I added blog posts to the text. And I’ve kept blogging since. The thing about blogging since is that I’ve discussed changes as they happened.
   The need for more mobility equipment. Changes to carer routines. Having a carer, one at a time, to get us through the day. The gradual shift in items of furniture. Back-up systems. More carers. Two carers at a time, twice a day. And, on occasion, when blogging, I end up talking vaguely about the care team and things we all have to deal with.
   What’s the upshot of that recent visit by the ex-regular? Now the carers are starting to talk about getting this book. Which will lead them to the blog. Some of them will start reading the blog: some won’t. It’s a monthly blog, and I write a brief piece on a topic…
   That book was from 2017. In the days since? Short blog chats. Twelve a year, mostly. And quite easy to wade through. Regular binge readers will know I repeat myself. December brings talk of Christmas trees. I get the flamethrower out for the weeds in the summer. And so on.
   Here and there, I mention the carers. So now I’ll have the carers reading these blog posts and recognising a hell of a lot. The actual Christmas tree, for example. Or the way the garden is laid out. One carer is reading the book. And told me about the fireplace and its annoying remote control. That’s from the start of the book.
   I could see the dusty remote out of the corner of my eye. So I dusted it down and showed it to the carer in a surreal moment. And the carer, eventually reading this blog post, will experience another surreal moment. It’s all very self-referential. Obviously, I had to blog about it.
   But I had to do more than that. I remembered a theme in the book: one of updating hyperlinks to the outside world. Time to go back in and check those hyperlinks again. I do this, from time to bleary time. And so I found a few dead links again. Totally utterly dead links.
   I typed my way around them, and republished the book today. Also, there was a glitch that crept into the blurb. A change in formatting smashed all of the separate paragraphs into one block of text.
   Amazon rarely tramples over those details. Circumstances beyond my control. I reached for the toolbox, and I knocked the rust off. At least fixing the glitch lies within my power.
   So there are blogs about having two fridges. Which the carers can see, when they go into the kitchen. I blog about the door chime that goes off when they walk in. This is the place where they can go to the toilet in comfort. You’d think a heated toilet in winter would be standard, in the world of caring for people.
   Apparently not. I provide a rare service. The carers come in and tell me I should charge admission to the toilet facilities. I’d add a coin slot, but these days we’re so used to the electronic transfer of funds that no one would be able to pay. So the toilet remains, mercifully, free at the point of use. Which is the whole point.
   I worked my way through the book, page by page, checking, double-checking, and treble-checking. I was advised of dozens of potential spelling errors. Amazon told me so. I should say that bit about potential spelling errors another way. Patenshul. For I scatter Scottish words and variant spellings throughout the book.
   When writing a book in that way, I end up adding Broad Scots™ to the internal dictionary. But I have to go round the houses a second time inside the Amazon Kindle system, backstage.
   The hyperlinks that failed? I removed them. And the ones that worked? Surprised me that they worked. Regional words were ticked on a list and I had zero errors by the end of it. Then, after confessing that I never used artificial intelligence – only my own, and that fuelled by coffee – I hit the button to update the publication.
   Long story short…the updated book is officially updated. I shouldn’t have to check it for hyperlinks…oh, for a long time. Here I am, blogging about blogging, writing about writing, giving you an update on updates. It’s all circling around the campfire, trying to find the best place to get a decent heat out of the blast without being fried.
   It’s been a time of checking internal hyperlinks that never give me bother, and scorching a few external hyperlinks that simply cannot be saved. Yes, I gave myself more work to do. And I thought many of those external pathways would fall to dust over time. But that didn’t bother me. It’s healthy to return to the work, periodically, and make sure it is still there. Accessible. Functioning.
   This time around, I had to drive a stake through several vampiric hyperlinks. There. I’m never coming back to them. They are done. Twitter links that were Twitter links when Twitter was still Twitter. It is still Twitter. And it is always going to be Twitter. But it has had the life knifed out of it.
   Some hyperlinks lead to these blog posts, and a few photographic images that might appeal to readers. Give them a visual hint or two, concerning the whole journey. One day the world will end. Maybe the hyperlinks will be out in the depths of space by then, and only robot astronauts will survive to read the blog through the book.
   I was going to write about the government, ripping off carers, or potentially ripping us off, but that can wait a month. Then, in July, I can look back and talk about the first half of the year. And of being ripped off by the government in that first half.
   Oh, we’re better off now. If you ignore the bit about being ripped off. There’s still hope. The government may pay out a compensatory fee in the second half of this caring game. I won’t hold my breath for a month. Something tells me I already know how the next blog post will go. Still, I could be pleasantly surprised.
   I won’t be, though.
   Two carers never walked into a bar. The blog title was misleading. If any carers walk into a bar, it’s off-duty. Doesn’t stop some of them putting in requests for alcoholic drinks while I’m mixing up frothy strawberry milkshakes. Oh, how we laugh.

 

DEMENTIA CARE: DOING MAINTENANCE TO GET MORE MAINTENACE DONE.

 

In the bathroom there’s an extractor fan. It stopped working. I put in a request for maintenance. This fan was fixed once before, over its long life. Never been replaced. These days, a long life for an electrical gadget is anything over ten years in operation.
   Long enough for the fan to become extinct. The electrician explained that they don’t support those fans any longer. There are now better fans available. He’d have to order a whole fan, disconnect the old power arrangement, and hook up new wiring to the power.
   In the loft.
   He’d need loft access.
   Oh.
   Now the loft is a place I store things in. For a time. Items go out of the way until I can arrange for removal. Maybe I’ll bring an item back down from the loft and use it. Or I will transfer storage from the loft to the garden hut. Beyond those options, I can send a thing to charity or to one of several bins.
   In the past few days I’ve put stuff back in action, recycled paper, shredded paper, sent stuff to metal and glass recycling, and put things in the final bin. The one that doesn’t recycle anything. Why? I must arrange loft access for the electrician.
   At one time, there was no great loft access to the place he wanted to go to. A section of the loft just above the bathroom. When the water heating system was upgraded, there was no more need for the ancient plastic water tank perched on a wooden frame inside the loft, just off-centre, past the hatch.
   What did that mean? It meant removal of the water tank. The framework is still partly in place. Pipes that used to work around the water tank were capped off if no longer needed. One pipe snaked up the side of the wooden frame and slithered back down again.
   This is why I’ve preserved the remnants of the wooden frame. If I am working in the loft and trip at that point, the wooden frame stops an accident from turning into a disaster. It shields the snaky pipe. With the water tank a mere memory, that opened up the loft. Until that revamp, you could only access the other side. And the other side was where everything was stored.
   I now have both sides available. Which means…I’ve blocked off easy access to the space over the bathroom by storing things there. So my maintenance task was to clear up the main loft area, pack things more neatly, more efficiently, and then transfer all the other stored items to that side.
   Then, with everything stored in the old area where everything used to be stored anyway, the electrician will have a clear run to the cable that comes up from the bathroom fan he’ll install. He’ll sort out the power flow. That reminds me. I must empty the cupboard downstairs, so he can have access to the fusebox.
   There’s been more to it than that. I’ve always kept this narrow alley available through the last of the wooden frame. But that’s not good enough for the electrician. I decided I’d knock the framework back down to the minimum required to protect the snaky pipe, and I’d make the improvised flooring more secure while I went about this.
   Granted, clearing a path for the electrician is the same as clearing a path for myself. So everyone benefits from the idea. With all the stuff in the loft stored to one side, I’ll move the lights around. I keep lights on hooks, leading back to an extension hub. Replaced the old hub with a newer one, for practical reasons. So making a few temporary changes won’t be a problem.
   I’ve been given the date of execution of the repair. And I am rationing out the work on a daily basis, waiting until early evening so the carers are out of the way and there aren’t any more deliveries, calls from clinics, or visits by other healthcare professionals.
   Clearing or rearranging a loft is best done all at once or in stages. I’d do this all at once…but I am a carer. And you have to break almost everything into manageable pieces. The loft is one of the most dangerous areas in a house. Basically, inside the hatch, you face all the fun of another dangerous place – the top of the stairs – without the stairs.
   Instead there’s a ladder. So any fall is direct.
   I’ve rarely tumbled down stairs. Usually, I fall and slide down a few steps, coming to a halt. Even a full slide down the length of the stairs would be annoying. But the danger of tumbling the length of the stairs is present. Never mind all the times I was fine. It’s the one time that fucks you up that really fucks you up.
   Realistically, I don’t think there’s anything worth grabbing if I slip and fall out of the hatch. I’d bounce off the ladder, using my feet as awkward shock-absorbers. Any attempt to grab the ladder would result, clearly, in shredding my skin on the aluminium. All those awkward angles and ladder fixtures. Just waiting to rip me silly.
   Potentially, the stairs are almost the worst problem. And the loft. I still rate the kitchen the most dangerous part of the house. That’s where the gas cooker is. A recent visit by an engineer took us into talk of the last upgrade to the gas supply, and the real reason for the changes. Modernisation. That wasn’t it. Modernisation was an excuse for quickly fixing a flaw perceived in the old design.
   I remember how it was all arranged, and what the engineer said to me matched up to what was done. He just explained the dangerous part out loud. It was played out as modernisation so as not to scare anyone. They didn’t want to cause a panic.
   That means. What does that mean? It means the gas engineers didn’t want everyone jumping to the head of the queue to have their gas fixed ahead of everyone else jumping to the head of the queue. Instead, it was a case of waiting your turn and hoping your house didn’t blow up in the meantime.
   We were all fine. This new piece of maintenance should be easy for the electrician. I’ll remove a mirror from the bathroom so it doesn’t get in the way of progress. By the time he arrives, the loft will be ready for him. The only dangers are…tripping and falling out of the hatch…tripping and falling through into a room below, and tripping and falling catastrophically, either rupturing a water pipe or piercing a live electrical cable.
   I’ve never fallen from the hatch, crashed into a room, ruptured a pipe or pierced a cable. And I’m not in the mood to do any of those things now, or make things easier for the electrician to do those things now. Little mess and no fuss. No mess, preferably.
   The most important thing is to remember to have the ladder and hatch ready, and switch on the lights up in the loft. I handle that from down here. Being a carer, I’m always looking at that loft and ways to make it safer. There’s one awkward area of the roof with a bathroom sponge fixed to it, so I won’t bump my head if I forget to duck.
   That loft is at its safest, now. Cluttered. This is the nature of using it for temporary storage. Items keep moving around. The improvised floorspace is its own massive loft shelf. If I pack everything away efficiently, I’ll have no trouble on this job. It’ll be harder to remove things.
   I’ll just have to go with the time-tested rule. Oh for a life, for a life, oh.
   LI-FO. That’s LAST IN – FIRST OUT. Going by this saying…yes…sometimes it is better to work in small stages, when up in the loft. There’s a fair bit of rearranging before you move anything down to the floor below. Often, it is best to start out in the garden, at the hut, when planning loft improvements.
   I’ve moved stuff. Hammered nails in. Hauled nails out. Reached for the saw. I keep a saw in the loft, along with other tools, to save traipsing back and forth. For safety, I have one eye on the other eye keeping an eye on things. There’s a phone at my hip if I must call for help. First Aid is nearby.
   And I have a clearer path to the ladder, from downstairs. Another mini-adventure. I resisted putting a bookcase next to the area under the hatch. But I calculated that a slim bookcase wouldn’t stand in the way of the ladder. A tall bookcase. And easy for me to navigate my way by, thanks to familiarity.
   But the electrician isn’t familiar with the set-up. So I performed an obvious calculation. I could swap the tall thin bookcase for a short thin bookcase. After finding space to pile books when I offloaded them, I made the switchover. Much safer for me, in hindsight. Hindsight is what I have to use when climbing down the ladder. It’s just how the space is arranged.

 

DEMENTIA CARE: MAINTENANCE NEVER STOPS, TRUE.

Many systems tick along without needing much assistance. You can go so long before something breaks that you don’t recall a time when that something broke before. Twice within a week, two door handles flew off. I had to research the name of the bit that was causing the problem, so I’d know what to order in as a fix.
   My quick temporary fix was to swap downstairs doorhandles with upstairs ones that are used less often - and to leave those upstairs doors ajar. That way, the downstairs carers could still use the toilet without screaming for help inside an accidentally locked room.
   They’d have been fine. It is almost impossible to stay locked inside the toilet. The handle that pulls away, with no hope left, is on the outside. Inside, if the handle does pull away, ouch, it carries the spindle with it. And you can insert the spindle to turn the handle on your side, no problem.
   Spindle. One of the words I learned. The term I was looking for was grub screw. It is a type of bolt. These bolts go into the handle and rest flush with it so that you don’t tear your fingers apart on a raised thread. Looking at the failed handles, I learned that the grub screws had long stalks on them.
   A very old design. The stalk, whatever its official name is, provides a barrier that, when fixed in place, holds the handle to the spindle. With time, this very old design simply shears off through metal fatigue. We’re talking about a house that still has the original handles from the day the place was ready to inhabit.
   Design has moved on. Grub screws have a raised area instead of a long stalk. The fix is to remove the broken piece and fit a new one. I had to buy in. The internet offered many cheap solutions. And a few expensive ones that covered selections. I didn’t want selections.
   So I measured very precisely, and learned that I would get by on a 5 mm grub screw. I counted the doors. They’d all need fixing at some point, if these old bolts were starting to go within days of each other. Count the doors. Double the number of bolts required. Order a packet of those. Hope that my measuring was true.
   Did I need a selection box of grub screws of many different sizes and lengths? No. These specialised bolts are pretty much there for use in door handles. I have no other conceivable use for them. Thinking hard about that. No. There’s nothing in the house that could do with a fix involving a grub screw bolt. Just the door handles.
   Recognise the faulty or broken part. Arrange a replacement. Buy in. Wait. Then start changing all the old bits over. There were a few problems. In the door to my immediate left, part of the door handle mechanism is jammed. Even with the old grub screw removed, the handle won’t come off.
   I know why. It’s a spindle problem. And there’s very little I can do about that. I added the new grub screw anyway. With time, the new grub screws will work loose, and handles will fly off again. But the screws themselves shouldn’t be worn away or cracked.
   See a broken thing. Fix a broken thing. Or have someone come in and fix a broken thing. Replace a thing with a spare or buy a replacement. These old grub screws did their job decade after decade. I never game them much thought. Suddenly I had to give them thought.
   Replacing the door handles entirely was going to be a whole production. Identifying the tiny thing that needed fixing. That was a lot easier. I started with descriptions. Describe the thing in a door handle that holds the door handle on. Okay, hit the search engine. Right. These are grub screws. They are bolts. You need a bunch of these in a packet.
   They are cheap. What does the Amazon listing say? Item is often returned. Unsuitable. Reviews? This didn’t fit. Measure, measure, measure. The delivery came about an hour before the next shift of carers arrived. I resolved to remove my temporary fix of the toilet door and put in a long-lasting one.
   Building up a routine, I managed to work my way around most of the house before breaking away to deal with carers. See a problem. Fix a problem. The last big maintenance thing was the valve regulating the hot water, and a heating engineer dealt with that.
   Not long after, it was time for annual heating maintenance. That engineer told me the old valve was replaced by a new design of valve that doesn’t develop the same fault as often. Confidentially, there was a flaw in the old design. You go ages without fixing a thing and then must fix all the things.
   Maintenance never stops. True of any household. But there’s a focus on fixing things ahead of being fixed – having spares – in a house where you are caring for someone. I’m almost always ahead of the game. In the case of a gas heating problem, I can take steps, annually, to reduce the prospect of trouble. But that’s an area you generally leave to the professionals.
   Next. More professional stuff. Bathroom repairs. I managed a repair to the toilet downstairs without too much difficulty. Always on the lookout for trivial things. Stop them at the trivial stage. Tighten those taps. Or loosen them just a bit. Whatever you can do that you have to do, do that.
   But the bathroom needs a fix to an extractor fan. And the shower demands a replacement part that I don’t keep in stock. That’ll be for the bathroom repair guy to deal with.
   Things in the house that need moved to one side and back again, tightened, loosened, cleaned, moved right across a room to a new position, checked, or even replaced…you can’t let any of those items slide. I switched to my spare electric toothbrush. The regular one was done. Yes, I can go to a manual backup. But once I’ve owned an electric toothbrush for an age, it’s time to bring a new one in – just in advance of the day of replacement.
   Maintenance really is all about spares. Have them. Arrange them. Hold the fort together while a delivery arrives. Yes, there are gaps in your routine. I never thought to have replacement grub screws on standby. That’s right. I couldn’t name them to start with. Well, now I know. And I have a few spares there, just in case. Fix the thing early if you can. Use the best type of fix. I had all sorts of tools for fixing the old washing machine. My fixes kept it going until the new washing machine arrived. Job done.
   I’ve talked about fixes before. And I’ll do so again. Sometimes maintenance is about fixing a problem and not a device. Just glancing around the main caring room, I found it difficult to read the time on the clock. It’s about angle, position, the nature of the clock itself.
   Not a clock to replace. It’s one of those picture deals. Photos around it. These provide memories. Talking points for the carers. Also, it still works. It’s fine when I’m in the other half of the room, nearer the bed. But when I sit on a stool next to the chair, to dish out meals, the time spent can be important. I need the time at a glance.
   Why don’t I wear a watch? It would catch on so many things, as a carer. I have time on my phone, in a pouch at my hip. But my hands are full. Time at a glance. Maintenance meant buying a calendar style clock with bold numbers, easy to read across the room with a shift of the eyes.
   This is why maintenance never stops. You solve problems. The room looks super-organised. Yes, it is. And that’s based on all the problems I had to fix over many years as a carer. I have a toolbox upstairs and another downstairs, so that I don’t need to change floors to reach for tools. That has saved me from all sorts of trouble, so many times.
   Obviously, as a wintry spring howls around the walls, there’s garden maintenance. But I tend to think of that as gardening. The weed war started just the other day. I won the first battle. And I’ll win all the rest of those battles, too. I hate seeing a weed, annoying me by its mere existence. And I get that feeling when something unbreakable suddenly unaccountably breaks.
   But for those moments, there are spares. Or spares on the internet. And I get by. Writing this blog post is now done using spares. I could no longer preview the post before publishing. So I had to switch to a spare browser, where that is still possible. Carer blog. So. Carer-related maintenance of a sort.