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.

 

DEMENTIA CARE: WAITING FOR AN ENGINEER.

I’d have blogged a week ago, but I was waiting for an engineer. With one thing to talk about, lined up for this talk, this written talk, I was forced to wait. Yes, I could’ve written anyway and left the end of the story dangling off a cliff for another month. Wasn’t worth the drama.
   This is the story of hot water. Not the heating. Just the heating of the water. Unexpected frost rolled in for a few days, and so the Scottish weather was cauld. The sun came out, true, but there was no warmth in that. Heating? It heated.
   With elderly care there are two problems. One is heating the house in winter. Please heat the house in winter. The other problem is heating the house in summer. Please don’t heat the house in summer.
   The water began to act unpredictably. Slow to heat up. It turned lukewarm. There was a sudden burst of heat. Back to lukewarm. This wasn’t the end of the world. If you are a bath person, yes, okay, I see your point. It is the end of the world. Luckily, I am a shower person and the shower is on its own electric circuit. Nothing to do with the gas. That’s the whole point of the shower system. If your hot water goes, you still have hot water.
   As for elderly care, you must be careful with warm water and super-sensitive skin. Lukewarm water with a burst of heat to it is adequate. Failing that, there is always the one-cup kettle that does you sub-boiling water in 30 seconds flat. Throw a few cups into the basin and mix with cool water and you are good to go.
   In other words, yes, you’ll get by until the heating engineer arrives.
   I haven’t had to call a heating engineer in so long that the experience has changed. Or has it? I was warned by the automated recording that my call may be handled by Artificial Intelligence. Okay. How is that going to work? I’m not sure. Either the person on the other end of the phone was a school-leaver nervous in the job and sticking to the script like glue…or someone created an Artificially Intelligent voice sounding like that.
   Was the guy wooden? I’m not saying he was wooden, but if you nudged him he’d rock back and forth like a painted horse. Was the guy an Artificially Intelligent Scotsman? (Here, we usually call those POLITICIANS.) I couldn’t very well ask him.
   Are you for real?
   The thing is, he pretty much sounded artificial. One of the giveaways is mispronouncing Scottish things. So I was 99% sure he wasn’t real. Though one of the carers who comes in…she mispronounces Scottish things. There are entire sections of the map with place-names that would fit inside The Lord of the Rings and no one would notice. None now live, who remember how to pronounce it.
   You have to treat these artificial chat bots as real people. They are responding to you, after all. So any gap in the conversation is a gap you have to fill with detail so you can prompt the next response, working your way down the list of problems until you reach the confirmation of an engineer being sent out.
   Before all that, you’ve already spoken to a real person who asks about the problem and they put you through to the robot: presumably already set up to deal with the thing you told the living human being. The difference between the real person and the robot one is still a difference. Give it a year and I’ll have a robot of my own, phoning the problem in to the robot on the other end of the line.
   The upshot was…an engineer. Twelve hours later, thanks to priority service, the engineer arrived. It was the valve. I would notice this in summer, as the hot water wouldn’t work but my heating would suddenly come on. With a new valve in place, hot water would return to being consistent.
   He didn’t have a valve with him. But he could order one for the next week. We’d get by. Thank you, electric shower and thank you to the one-cup kettle. Also, thank you to the lukewarm water we could still receive. And so, almost a week went by…
   We survived. Then the next engineer turned up, waved a box at me, and went to fix the problem. He reappeared almost instantly, declaring that the wrong part was ordered. Well. I didn’t have anything to say to that. Fortunately for everyone concerned he had one in the van. He went to the van. There, he retrieved another very similar box.
   The carers were coming in as he worked away, so I used the one-cup kettle for the basin. We were all fine. By the time he left, consistent warm water was restored.
   But that isn’t the story. I thought about the loss of heating itself with the frost all around us. The worst thing is to notice that in the morning. And you’ll realise quickly. Telephone the hotline. Talk to a real person. Transfer to a robot. Book the appointment. And then…
   Wait…
   And wait.
   Now the heating thing is different. You should get priority for elderly care and it is worth mentioning to the human you speak to initially. Sometimes the engineers are just slammed. They’ll get to you when they get to you. And I have plenty of throws and duvets and warmer clothes for emergencies.
   But I don’t fancy waiting half a day for a fix with frost on the ground. If the worst came to the worst, I could move furniture around to create a space in front of the ornament.
   The ornament is a fireplace. It works. But it was only ever meant to be ornamental. As it wasn’t used, and remains unplugged, I rearranged the furniture to get the best use out of the room. It is the main caring room, aside from the kitchen.
   The heating itself hasn’t had a breakdown since…I think a circuit board went. That or the pump. It’s rare. They take care of these things during annual maintenance. But you don’t want to be caught short. Not going into winter, in the midst of winter, or heading out the other side of winter into a spring that’s never quite sure what it is.
   And I remember, one time, when it was clear that the spare part wouldn’t be ready until the next day. So the engineer left loads of tiny electrical heaters to protect the main room. And there were throws, duvets, and heavy clothing to see us through.
   You can always heat the kitchen using the oven, wasteful as that is, in an emergency.
   The thinking was…I really don’t want to be caught short for twelve hours or until the next day. This is unlikely to happen, but look at what just happened there. And that was for the water. Not for the main heating. With that in mind, I ordered what looks like a portable electrical radiator. Just to see what that’s like.
   It works. You can’t dry clothes on it for safety reasons, but it works. I delayed writing this until the engineer came and went. Okay, he came and went to the van and came back again and then went away. I had a spare radiator before he arrived. With the radiator checked out, I’ve ordered a second one. But there’s no need to wait to blog about the arrival.
   Two should be enough for emergencies. I may order in a third…purely based on the notion that I have room in storage for a third one. After that, I would run out of room. It is awkward buying them in as spring arrives. But this is Scotland, and spring arrives on the stage like a shy ballerina who doesn’t know if that’s her chosen calling. She sees the company dotted around the seats, as this is a rehearsal. And then she runs away.
   The heating stays on through most of March, so I’d better have spare heating now. Depending on how awful April is, the heating may be on through a fair chunk of April. Anyway. If I buy the portable radiators in now, we are all set for trouble in the next winter. And that’s the main thing.
   Our heating is so reliable that the only thing it can do is work reliably or fail horribly at the worst possible time. And I don’t really think I was prepared for failure in the depths of winter. If we have to go half a day, another day, before an engineer gets to us…we should have more of a plan than dusting off a disused fireplace. Those things smell of dust when you fire them up, telling you how long ago it was that you briefly used them.
   I remember laughter when the offer of insurance was made. No, it is just an ornament. It’s been switched on to see if the bloody thing works. That is just as true of the new portable radiator. But I won’t be moving furniture around to activate it. I’ll be moving it around the furniture instead, which is far more preferable.