DEMENTIA CARE: BANANA FUCKING ROULETTE.

Following close on the heels of the banana problem, there was the fire. I wrote about the fire first, and didn't feel like discussing banana fucking roulette.
   Okay. Banana milk roulette.

Nutritional advice is well in hand, thanks for not asking.
   Fussy eating is part of dementia. Concentrating on eating is one thing. Too many distractions and, suddenly, this soup is cold.
   But taste is a factor. I don't like this soup any more.
   Or this soup. This soup. Or that soup. Gradually, the options dwindle. For variety, I bought in flavoured milk when milk didn't seem all that appetising.
   Strawberry milk. And banana milk. Tried all the combinations, so I did. Bottles. Cartons. Smaller bottles. Multi-packs of small bottles, for ease of delivery to the cup in handy doses.
   Then this version of strawberry milk is no longer available in the supermarket. Switch to more banana milk, then. That's working just fine. Until...
   Illness. Being sick one day. Later in the day, too. This threw things off. Recovery next day, and on we went. Until. Sick. Later in the day, too.
   Look for a pattern. When most of the food going in is yellow, it's hard to say what's causing the sickness. If it's even the food, at all.

Chicken soup? Banana milk? It's all yellow. I'd rewrite a Coldplay hit just for this blog, rhyming spew to make it all work. But life is too short for that shit.
   Problem. If it's the milk, that's fucked up. For convenience, I'd unpacked the six-packs of banana milk at once and deposited all those bottles in one large fridge drawer.
   Clearly, there could be a suspect batch in there. Six bottles that were subjected to foulness. How to tell? I'd right royally mixed the bottles together, when loading them into the fridge. Damn it.

As a carer, I decided to play banana milk roulette with a bottle. This might not prove a damn thing. But I had to start somewhere, and I had to start late in the day.
   To take dodgy milk, I had to act at night and risk some sleep. I couldn't incapacitate myself during the day. Too much routine to disturb, that way.
   So. For supper, I took a bottle of banana milk. Within the hour, the liquid throttled my intestines and I knew I had my culprit bang to rights.
   What affects the elderly severely often only affects us in milder ways. I recovered. Then I knew I had to pull the pins on all the banana grenades in the fridge.
   They couldn't be trusted.
   I also planned to take an early trip into town, to replace the poison with different milk products. Suddenly, there was a gaping maw in the refrigerated landscape.
   And so, here, you see the result of playing banana roulette with milk bottles. My recycling factory. Bottles. Tops. Foil lids. Empty shells.
   Some of the bottles were suspect. Three, at most, if one pack of six was the only pack affected. She'd had two, and I'd taken one, and they'd all been foul. Not to taste. The strong banana flavour masked any immediate problems.
   Recovering from this bout of illness took time. Appetite really had to build again. And banana milk was looked on as so devious that it had to be scored off the list. Temporarily? Permanently? Too soon to say.
   I survived the ordeal. More importantly, I survived the fire that followed. Luckily, there were good moments mixed in with the bad. Swearing fucking helps, too.