I arrange a lot of things.
My mother struggled to sign the card. Dementia wasn't the problem. No, it was the fucking pen and the glossiness of the card that defeated us.
Us? I went over the scrawl myself, to aid an arthritic hand. Effing card.
Well, I had a text message on my phone. Here's the exchange...
Hi, thanks for the card. It was very nice, :)) I'm going to give my aunt a phone to thank her. xx.
She is in rah baff thu noo.
Right-oh! Is her phone no' working?
It shid be. She disnae cairry it in rah baff, but.
It sounded like it was in the bath. Oh-eeeeeeeeee.
Jings.
Later, bath done, it was time to receive a phone call. The message came through on my phone, and we discovered no calls were getting through to my mother's phone.
My phone was borrowed for a hilarious conversation between aunt and niece.
I took the other phone away and checked it out. Charged. Signal was good. Nothing. I tried calling it from my phone, later, and had no joy.
In the time-honoured fashion, I switched the bloody thing off and on again. The SIM card then failed to register. I know that, as a pointless message told me so.
The next step was to e-mail the service provider. We're talking about a pay-as-you go service, as there was little point in my mother having a monthly contract...and that was before the dementia kicked in.
I have the same system running. Most of my communication is through e-mail. That way, I get it in writing. Therefore, my phone-usage is patchy.
But I use the phone often enough to avoid being disconnected. Fail to use the phone for months on end, and you are downgraded to the second level of hell.
Continue in that way and you'll be downgraded to the third level of hell. After that, comes banishment.
This is what happened. The phone, with very little credit in it, fell from the favour of the gods. That was that.
Was I to blame? Only partly. But I'll own that slice of the problem. Her use of the phone was spare. So she was to blame for that. Then she developed dementia. And she wasn't to blame for that.
I started transferring important numbers to my phone. The doctor, the bank, the dentist, and so on. If incoming calls reared their telephonic heads, I took the damage.
Dementia reduced her use of the phone. My planning sidestepped her need to handle the vital calls. And people stopped calling her.
In the old days, people would call her. She'd not keep her phone on her person, and have to rummage in a handbag or race to another room AND MISS THE CALL.
Then she'd call back. And her phone, being used, would avoid disconnection.
Now the people who try to call through, after not phoning for years, find they can't get through.
My crazy cousin is crazy enough to forget to call in regularly. But she does turn up in person. So there is that.
There you go. The phone was disconnected. But this isn't about someone who hardly used a telephone. It isn't about someone who used the machine less and less as concentration faded. And it isn't about my plan, to ensure that critical phone calls made it through to me.
This blog post is about the people who stopped calling. If they'd called, that phone would've been used to call them back. Even if I'd stepped in to make sure the calls were returned.
In the week that I discovered the phone was disconnected, I read an article about a woman who came down with a debilitating disease. Her friends stopped visiting her, so she moved her life online.
It is tough for people who know those with dementia. They don't like to visit. It's painful for them. They fade away. And that takes further contact away from the cared-for.
A telephone call to dementia-land is a very frustrating experience. Hell, a telephone call to my mother was a very frustrating experience before the dementia surfaced. Mobile phones are MOBILE, and you carry them with you...
Leaving the phone in the kitchen and going to any other room in the building, or out of the building, isn't helpful. Multiply that frustration by adding dementia to the formula.
But a call or a visit will make the world of difference. I left my crazy cousin having a crazy conversation with my crazy mother on my phone. Laughter spread through the rooms, like an antidote, trickling.
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