Shit.
I'd have called this blog post FUCK MY LIFE, but I tried typing that just now and almost came up with FUCK MY LOAF. This is not an invitation to engage in sexual intercourse with my supper.
Can't offer any advice on the use of Sandwich Spread as a lubricant. For those of you who are new to this, and who wondered what to expect, welcome to my dementia care blog.
Fucking sneezing now. Typical. Okay. Right to it, then...
The heating broke down. This is the heating that never breaks down. It kept breaking down. Everything else died with it. Routine, for a start.
Okay, it's true. I'm a carer...so waiting in for a heating engineer isn't a problem. No special arrangements required: I am there.
But disruption is, oddly, disruptive...and routine was all over the place.
But disruption is, oddly, disruptive...and routine was all over the place.
On top of that, it was the worst time to find out my phone was being fucked around with.
And I was given the wrong biscuits in the food delivery.
A parcel was late. (Update. Lost and refunded.)
Legal bullshit came in that I had to deal with. (I filled out the forms. Hope that's what they asked for.)
Felt a bit ill. Wondered if I might be coming down with the plague. (Jury is out.)
What else? Loads and loads of shitty things happened at the same effing time. Tiny inconsequential things of massive importance.
Oh, yes, old coins were taken out of circulation and I had to ditch those in a hurry. Good job I'd been making change to gain the new coins anyway.
I stockpiled dental products and sent the old coins packing in one lumpy transaction.
Oh, yes, old coins were taken out of circulation and I had to ditch those in a hurry. Good job I'd been making change to gain the new coins anyway.
I stockpiled dental products and sent the old coins packing in one lumpy transaction.
Every little thing I tried to do became a major undertaking. And all the major stuff just floated there in mid-air, waiting to happen eventually.
Scrappy few weeks, early in October.
And then, the other night, an electrical fire. Jolly fun. But wait. There's more to that.
The first time I dealt with an electrical fire, I handled an incident that involved the operation of equipment in a room I'd just vacated. Did leaving the cared-for in that room for a minute somehow CAUSE the fire?
I doubted that. The equipment was old. A miniature heating blanket. I ran it for ten minutes on a winter's night, to take any chill off the bed.
The elderly love heat. (Except when the bathwater is too warm, but that's a different tale.)
That blanket didn't run any longer than usual. It caught fire, which was unusual.
Shock ending to that tale: I survived.
Let's take this story further. Time for a second electrical fire involving equipment left running in a room I had just vacated. Equipment operated by the cared-for.
The hair-dryer.
My hair-dryer is a towel. I haven't used a machine to dry my hair in years. Once, I had a sparky experience with a hair-dryer and decided that a towel was the safer bet.
And I was right.
But my mother's routine involves use of a hair-dryer, and I am reluctant to shut down that routine by leaving her with a towel and air passing through the room at a slow pace.
Any routine she can still handle...she should still handle. Routines give her something important to do. If she handles those routines well, then that is important to me.
Oh, I set up the hair-washing for her, as I must check the hot water isn't too hot...
Well, away I went to wash my hair upstairs. She emerged into the hall and shouted up to me.
This thing is on fire.
I raced down into the kitchen to catch a whiff of smoke. Now I am at the moment of crisis. Does the situation get worse, right this second? If there's smoke and fire in the back hall, then I can evacuate the both of us from the front hall...so we're golden, no matter what happens next. Golden, yet not fiery.
As I go along, I don't hear any of the smoke alarms. I dash through into the main room, with its open door, and discover darkness.
The hall light shows me the hair-dryer, curling with smoke. Whatever happened, the fusebox tripped and cut out that circuit. No yellow, no orange, in the dark. Lack of flames.
I unplugged the hair-dryer and carried it three swift steps to the back door. Out I went. The rainy night did the rest.
No smoke alarms went off. Hardly any smoke. (It smells A LOT, even as a trace.) The hair-dryer overheated, melted a bit, and tripped the fusebox. One circuit only. Good sign. I switched the fuse back in place and light returned.
Then I examined the scene. No damage. Absolutely no flames. I ventilated the place. Upstairs and down.
As with the first electrical fire, I'd prepared to evacuate within seconds of being notified.
When I reached the door, it was time to go.
The current was already isolated, but I made extra-sure of that. And I removed the source of smoke to the outside world. As before, I evacuated inside a minute.
And, as before, I deliberately didn't reach for my telephone while still inside the building.
The hair-dryer was old. Was my mother responsible for accidentally overheating the device? She barely had time to switch it on. It must have popped off almost instantly.
Shit.
But no, there's more.
I evaluate changes in light of these incidents, obviously. Point number one. I make sure the hall light is on when my mother must go from main room to kitchen and back for hair-washing.
This made the risk-assessment easier when I stepped into the darkened room - the hall light was on a different electrical circuit, and it was easy to see the key in the door leading out. I had light to see by, when checking the damage.
Clear exit. Trace of smoke. No flames. And no alarm.
So that point about leaving the hall light on became more important to me. It was part of the routine that would stay vital.
Point number two. The main room has a CO detector, but not a smoke detector. This was part of the recommendation on placing detectors around the house...and I didn't think it good enough to skip an alarm in a room, so I made sure there was a CO detector there at least.
The nearest smoke detector was in the hall, and it was tested four days before. This test passed. All smoke and CO detectors pass the test every seven days, every week of the year, and I have spare batteries aplenty.
Point two needed fixing. Yes, the hall smoke detector was working. But the smoke travelled slowly, and time is critical in these situations. I decided that...
I'd buy a new smoke alarm and fit it in the main room anyway. There's no smoke alarm in the kitchen, for reasons of cookery, but I keep a CO alarm in there as a back-up just the same.
And I also decided that unsupervised use of a hair-dryer had to go. I'd need to sit in, in future, just to see if anything she did was contributing to the fire-risk.
All of that is under the bridge. Tonight, as I type this, I remembered a travel hair-dryer. It would cover this one night, waiting for the new hair-dryer to arrive.
She had to wash her hair, and a towel wouldn't satisfy her demands for a hair-dryer.
I fetched the travel hair-dryer and plugged it in to test it, away from the main room.
Whirrrrrr. The temporary hair-dryer fired up. And then it fired up. A massive yellow whoosh emerged from the front end and smoke instantly swirled from the rear.
I switched the fucker off, unplugged it, and carried it by the flex out to the dumping-ground where I now ritually ditch all the failed electrical heating devices that aren't blazing away.
Outside within a minute. No further sign of flaming or burning. I let the cold night air chill the machine's anger.
Fucking hell.
Did dementia cause the very first fire, with the miniature blanket? Unlikely. The second fire, with the old hair-dryer? I was unsure. The third flameout was down to me.
Here, the common denominator wasn't electrical equipment left on in the presence of someone suffering with concentration problems.
The common link was that all three electrical items were old. And the irony? I'd embarked on a programme of replacing old electrical pieces. Just not those three pieces, until they bared their fangs. My aim was to replace the large items.
Okay, I watch that toaster like a hawk...and it is new. Hell, I err on the side of mild toast.
Fucking electrical fires.
Discover the problem. Have plenty of alarms, well-stocked with batteries (and mains-operated), and CHECK those alarms regularly.
The mains-operated smoke alarm in the hall was on its separate circuit, fortunately. And its own back-up battery was replaced not too long ago.
Discover the problem. This thing is on fire. That doesn't tell me much. It might be all you get out of someone with dementia. Twice, with fires, she warned me before any smoke alarms kicked in. And they didn't kick in at all, with the second incident.
I was right there for the third incident, and not one of the three smoke alarms I passed went off.
Once you discover that problem, assess the risk. And by ASSESS, I mean work it the fuck out in the time it takes a coin to drop from your pocket to the floor.
Yes, that quickly.
Three times, luckily, it was easy to cut the power, isolate the risky object, and evacuate to the outside world inside sixty seconds.
Inspect. Check for flames. Hold your breath. Get out. Think about the telephone last of all. You are more important than a call to the fire brigade. Hit the street.
Had things been different, too wild, out of control, I had two major exits...aided by a very clear path through the kitchen. Don't clutter the thoroughfare, and never leave anything on your stairs. Well, maybe just a carpet.
No, dementia wasn't to blame. I saw that when the second hair-dryer flamed up in front of me. My rolling programme of updating old electrical devices continues...at a faster roll, I think.
And all the other petty shitty things, the phone trouble, missing items, the wrong biscuits, bashing my hand off a door...those I'd have written of in detail...but the fiery stuff took first place.
Although...
Here's an e-mail hint. If a customer types in the wrong e-mail to the company and MY INBOX is flooded with handy updates...
When the customer goes through the process of updating to the correct e-mail...here's a major tip, companies. Maybe try not asking the customer to confirm the correct updated e-mail by sending the confirmation link through to my in-box.
Because, y'know, Rebecca who booked her dirty weekend with Clive...she's not reading anything that goes to my in-box. Even if she somehow gave that company my e-mail instead of her own, she's still not actually me. It's a technical thing.
Random shit, all month long.
The phone saga was grim. (But resolved.) And the heating...one radiator suffered a dose of the sweats. A leak that you'd barely notice. I was asked by the third engineer to look out for it, and when I found the fucker I reported it to the fourth engineer.
He'd also been the second engineer, so he was glad to locate the problem. I lied to the handler on the phone, and said this was a priority leak. She'd wanted to keep me waiting another day, but I'd had enough by then.
And, on that other day, the first hair-dryer killed itself.
Is there a message in all this? Petty things hammer you. Major emergencies, hell, you handle those in your stride. And my stride took me outdoors, where the smoke was not my problem.
Dementia can lead to concentration trouble, over the use of dangerous machines. Most of those problems are gone. The cooker isn't part of her routine any longer, given her change in diet.
But the main danger here was out-of-date electrical items. And I was already gradually removing those from the house. This was nature's way of telling me to speed that process up.
No, there's more.
One other alarm went off.
Let's keep this short. The new hair-dryer was delivered by the supermarket driver who dropped off the food supplies. I took in the hair-dryer, an extension cable that would make the place safer by easing access to lights, and an all-new singing and dancing smoke alarm for the main room.
That's not the alarm I am talking about.
The hair-dryer still had its alarm attached to it. Cables wrapped the package in a tentacle embrace. A mysterious dial protruded from the lumpy control tube.
Surely the fuckers at the supermarket disarmed this bomb.
No.
I hacked through one cable to get at the hair-dryer box.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Except the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee part never ended in the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep part. The alarm kept going. It winked at me, with its red illuminated eye.
I removed the alarm and checked for an easy sure-fire method of disarming the bastard. Nothing. Clearly, I had to dunk this in the sink and drown it.
That's what I did. A muted beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee emerged from the water, with the occasional air-bubble farting its way to the surface.
Meanwhile, I put the shopping away, rearranged some lights, prepared meals, installed the smoke alarm and...
Twenty minutes of underwater sabotage did nothing to cook this electronic goose.
Right. Fuck it. Bomb-disposal. Here I go.
And I went. Took a hammer to it. Tried pliers. Hefted a screwdriver. Reached for a very sharp Stanley knife. Forty minutes of hammering, clattering, drowning, and I managed to hack open part of the frame.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
I held one thumb over the speaker hole to shield myself from the sound. Eventually, I cracked the case and dumped the innards in the sink. The machine beeped at me underwater.
With the electronics finally exposed, I played at more bomb-disposal. Should I cut the white wire or the white wire or the white wire? I think I'll cut the white wire.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
Must cut the second white wire.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
Obviously, third time is the charm.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
For fuck's sake! These wires are set to trigger the alarm if they lose signal...cutting them won't do anything except keep the alarm going.
I hacked through all the wires and drowned the contraption all over again. Okay, I know it is an alarm designed to stop electrical goods from being haulf-inched frae supermarkets...
But who has the time to fill a basin with water and carry that into the supermarket along with a hammer, a chisel, a knife, a set of pliers, a set of wire-cutters...
The machine defeated my wire-strippers, incidentally...
ANYWAY...
There's just the battery and the siren left. I try to lift the clip holding the battery in place, but even that is welded on. Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip...
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...eep.
And dead, after an hour.
That's my alarm story. I watched a video of a very similar alarm being dismantled on the internet. Guy took a big eff-off hammer to it. In conclusion...
Supermarkets should remove those alarms from delivered goods. The new hair-dryer works a treat. Right in front of me. As I stand guard against yet another electrical fire.
The first time I dealt with an electrical fire, I handled an incident that involved the operation of equipment in a room I'd just vacated. Did leaving the cared-for in that room for a minute somehow CAUSE the fire?
I doubted that. The equipment was old. A miniature heating blanket. I ran it for ten minutes on a winter's night, to take any chill off the bed.
The elderly love heat. (Except when the bathwater is too warm, but that's a different tale.)
That blanket didn't run any longer than usual. It caught fire, which was unusual.
Shock ending to that tale: I survived.
Let's take this story further. Time for a second electrical fire involving equipment left running in a room I had just vacated. Equipment operated by the cared-for.
The hair-dryer.
My hair-dryer is a towel. I haven't used a machine to dry my hair in years. Once, I had a sparky experience with a hair-dryer and decided that a towel was the safer bet.
And I was right.
But my mother's routine involves use of a hair-dryer, and I am reluctant to shut down that routine by leaving her with a towel and air passing through the room at a slow pace.
Any routine she can still handle...she should still handle. Routines give her something important to do. If she handles those routines well, then that is important to me.
Oh, I set up the hair-washing for her, as I must check the hot water isn't too hot...
Well, away I went to wash my hair upstairs. She emerged into the hall and shouted up to me.
This thing is on fire.
I raced down into the kitchen to catch a whiff of smoke. Now I am at the moment of crisis. Does the situation get worse, right this second? If there's smoke and fire in the back hall, then I can evacuate the both of us from the front hall...so we're golden, no matter what happens next. Golden, yet not fiery.
As I go along, I don't hear any of the smoke alarms. I dash through into the main room, with its open door, and discover darkness.
The hall light shows me the hair-dryer, curling with smoke. Whatever happened, the fusebox tripped and cut out that circuit. No yellow, no orange, in the dark. Lack of flames.
I unplugged the hair-dryer and carried it three swift steps to the back door. Out I went. The rainy night did the rest.
No smoke alarms went off. Hardly any smoke. (It smells A LOT, even as a trace.) The hair-dryer overheated, melted a bit, and tripped the fusebox. One circuit only. Good sign. I switched the fuse back in place and light returned.
Then I examined the scene. No damage. Absolutely no flames. I ventilated the place. Upstairs and down.
As with the first electrical fire, I'd prepared to evacuate within seconds of being notified.
When I reached the door, it was time to go.
The current was already isolated, but I made extra-sure of that. And I removed the source of smoke to the outside world. As before, I evacuated inside a minute.
And, as before, I deliberately didn't reach for my telephone while still inside the building.
The hair-dryer was old. Was my mother responsible for accidentally overheating the device? She barely had time to switch it on. It must have popped off almost instantly.
Shit.
But no, there's more.
I evaluate changes in light of these incidents, obviously. Point number one. I make sure the hall light is on when my mother must go from main room to kitchen and back for hair-washing.
This made the risk-assessment easier when I stepped into the darkened room - the hall light was on a different electrical circuit, and it was easy to see the key in the door leading out. I had light to see by, when checking the damage.
Clear exit. Trace of smoke. No flames. And no alarm.
So that point about leaving the hall light on became more important to me. It was part of the routine that would stay vital.
Point number two. The main room has a CO detector, but not a smoke detector. This was part of the recommendation on placing detectors around the house...and I didn't think it good enough to skip an alarm in a room, so I made sure there was a CO detector there at least.
The nearest smoke detector was in the hall, and it was tested four days before. This test passed. All smoke and CO detectors pass the test every seven days, every week of the year, and I have spare batteries aplenty.
Point two needed fixing. Yes, the hall smoke detector was working. But the smoke travelled slowly, and time is critical in these situations. I decided that...
I'd buy a new smoke alarm and fit it in the main room anyway. There's no smoke alarm in the kitchen, for reasons of cookery, but I keep a CO alarm in there as a back-up just the same.
And I also decided that unsupervised use of a hair-dryer had to go. I'd need to sit in, in future, just to see if anything she did was contributing to the fire-risk.
All of that is under the bridge. Tonight, as I type this, I remembered a travel hair-dryer. It would cover this one night, waiting for the new hair-dryer to arrive.
She had to wash her hair, and a towel wouldn't satisfy her demands for a hair-dryer.
I fetched the travel hair-dryer and plugged it in to test it, away from the main room.
Whirrrrrr. The temporary hair-dryer fired up. And then it fired up. A massive yellow whoosh emerged from the front end and smoke instantly swirled from the rear.
I switched the fucker off, unplugged it, and carried it by the flex out to the dumping-ground where I now ritually ditch all the failed electrical heating devices that aren't blazing away.
Outside within a minute. No further sign of flaming or burning. I let the cold night air chill the machine's anger.
Fucking hell.
Did dementia cause the very first fire, with the miniature blanket? Unlikely. The second fire, with the old hair-dryer? I was unsure. The third flameout was down to me.
Here, the common denominator wasn't electrical equipment left on in the presence of someone suffering with concentration problems.
The common link was that all three electrical items were old. And the irony? I'd embarked on a programme of replacing old electrical pieces. Just not those three pieces, until they bared their fangs. My aim was to replace the large items.
Okay, I watch that toaster like a hawk...and it is new. Hell, I err on the side of mild toast.
Fucking electrical fires.
Discover the problem. Have plenty of alarms, well-stocked with batteries (and mains-operated), and CHECK those alarms regularly.
The mains-operated smoke alarm in the hall was on its separate circuit, fortunately. And its own back-up battery was replaced not too long ago.
Discover the problem. This thing is on fire. That doesn't tell me much. It might be all you get out of someone with dementia. Twice, with fires, she warned me before any smoke alarms kicked in. And they didn't kick in at all, with the second incident.
I was right there for the third incident, and not one of the three smoke alarms I passed went off.
Once you discover that problem, assess the risk. And by ASSESS, I mean work it the fuck out in the time it takes a coin to drop from your pocket to the floor.
Yes, that quickly.
Three times, luckily, it was easy to cut the power, isolate the risky object, and evacuate to the outside world inside sixty seconds.
Inspect. Check for flames. Hold your breath. Get out. Think about the telephone last of all. You are more important than a call to the fire brigade. Hit the street.
Had things been different, too wild, out of control, I had two major exits...aided by a very clear path through the kitchen. Don't clutter the thoroughfare, and never leave anything on your stairs. Well, maybe just a carpet.
No, dementia wasn't to blame. I saw that when the second hair-dryer flamed up in front of me. My rolling programme of updating old electrical devices continues...at a faster roll, I think.
And all the other petty shitty things, the phone trouble, missing items, the wrong biscuits, bashing my hand off a door...those I'd have written of in detail...but the fiery stuff took first place.
Although...
Here's an e-mail hint. If a customer types in the wrong e-mail to the company and MY INBOX is flooded with handy updates...
When the customer goes through the process of updating to the correct e-mail...here's a major tip, companies. Maybe try not asking the customer to confirm the correct updated e-mail by sending the confirmation link through to my in-box.
Because, y'know, Rebecca who booked her dirty weekend with Clive...she's not reading anything that goes to my in-box. Even if she somehow gave that company my e-mail instead of her own, she's still not actually me. It's a technical thing.
Random shit, all month long.
The phone saga was grim. (But resolved.) And the heating...one radiator suffered a dose of the sweats. A leak that you'd barely notice. I was asked by the third engineer to look out for it, and when I found the fucker I reported it to the fourth engineer.
He'd also been the second engineer, so he was glad to locate the problem. I lied to the handler on the phone, and said this was a priority leak. She'd wanted to keep me waiting another day, but I'd had enough by then.
And, on that other day, the first hair-dryer killed itself.
Is there a message in all this? Petty things hammer you. Major emergencies, hell, you handle those in your stride. And my stride took me outdoors, where the smoke was not my problem.
Dementia can lead to concentration trouble, over the use of dangerous machines. Most of those problems are gone. The cooker isn't part of her routine any longer, given her change in diet.
But the main danger here was out-of-date electrical items. And I was already gradually removing those from the house. This was nature's way of telling me to speed that process up.
No, there's more.
One other alarm went off.
Let's keep this short. The new hair-dryer was delivered by the supermarket driver who dropped off the food supplies. I took in the hair-dryer, an extension cable that would make the place safer by easing access to lights, and an all-new singing and dancing smoke alarm for the main room.
That's not the alarm I am talking about.
The hair-dryer still had its alarm attached to it. Cables wrapped the package in a tentacle embrace. A mysterious dial protruded from the lumpy control tube.
Surely the fuckers at the supermarket disarmed this bomb.
No.
I hacked through one cable to get at the hair-dryer box.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Except the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee part never ended in the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep part. The alarm kept going. It winked at me, with its red illuminated eye.
I removed the alarm and checked for an easy sure-fire method of disarming the bastard. Nothing. Clearly, I had to dunk this in the sink and drown it.
That's what I did. A muted beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee emerged from the water, with the occasional air-bubble farting its way to the surface.
Meanwhile, I put the shopping away, rearranged some lights, prepared meals, installed the smoke alarm and...
Twenty minutes of underwater sabotage did nothing to cook this electronic goose.
Right. Fuck it. Bomb-disposal. Here I go.
And I went. Took a hammer to it. Tried pliers. Hefted a screwdriver. Reached for a very sharp Stanley knife. Forty minutes of hammering, clattering, drowning, and I managed to hack open part of the frame.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
I held one thumb over the speaker hole to shield myself from the sound. Eventually, I cracked the case and dumped the innards in the sink. The machine beeped at me underwater.
With the electronics finally exposed, I played at more bomb-disposal. Should I cut the white wire or the white wire or the white wire? I think I'll cut the white wire.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
Must cut the second white wire.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
Obviously, third time is the charm.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
For fuck's sake! These wires are set to trigger the alarm if they lose signal...cutting them won't do anything except keep the alarm going.
I hacked through all the wires and drowned the contraption all over again. Okay, I know it is an alarm designed to stop electrical goods from being haulf-inched frae supermarkets...
But who has the time to fill a basin with water and carry that into the supermarket along with a hammer, a chisel, a knife, a set of pliers, a set of wire-cutters...
The machine defeated my wire-strippers, incidentally...
ANYWAY...
There's just the battery and the siren left. I try to lift the clip holding the battery in place, but even that is welded on. Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip...
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...eep.
And dead, after an hour.
That's my alarm story. I watched a video of a very similar alarm being dismantled on the internet. Guy took a big eff-off hammer to it. In conclusion...
Supermarkets should remove those alarms from delivered goods. The new hair-dryer works a treat. Right in front of me. As I stand guard against yet another electrical fire.
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