This is the story of how that pot and spoon ended up in the sink. I had nothing to do with this. Handing out the pot and the spoon? Well, that's a different tale.
We'll start this story with the idea of being dipped in the Fountain of Youth. And we'll throw in a cast of thousands. At least a dozen, anyway.
There's a massacre.
And the lesson learned in planning is - stay flexible.
Morning routine. This morning. I'm blogging on the day this happened. It's hot weather, and we face a mini-heatwave at the top of the stairs.
The chair is waiting. She sits in the chair and we get those socks off. It's a collaborative effort.
I go around the other side of her chair to the bathroom, and she starts a rambling conversation that is cut short by a shaking fit and a slump. Eyes are open, but no one is home.
Around the corner, music is playing in the background. I leap in and squelch the music so there's clarity during the emergency call. If half her face drooped, I'd have left the music to play on and just shut the door on the din instead.
And I explain this call to her as I punch in the number. I've gauged the look on her face. Is it a lopsided look? That's the question to ask yourself. What about strength in the hands, or position of the limbs?
Well, she slumped her head. And the right arm flopped. But the general resting position might be stopping the left arm from flopping in the same way.
Has she lost strength down one side of her body? Doesn't look that way to me. At least she was sitting in a chair when it happened.
I hit the speaker button, so I can hear better. A woman is asking me which service I require.
Ambulance.
I'm straight through to the guy and he wants the number of the telephone and the number of the house and the street. I confirm all these things.
We don't just say these things. No. We say them and then confirm them. This is my first-ever emergency call.
I am calm. For a few seconds, watching her lose control, I felt panic. But I had to nail that down when I made the call. So I did. I nailed panic down with a huge fucking hammer of caring for someone.
The ambulance is on its way. Could I unlock the door so they can come in? The door is already open wide. I find the time to open the window wider and vent more heat.
It's been hot for days. Hotter than this. But it is muggy.
I cover symptoms. And I am asked to go through a few recovery tests. Somehow, spectacularly, she recovers. Maybe the open window had a say in that.
Perhaps we could get a smile out of her. Can she wave her hands over her head? Does she know her name? Is her speech slurred when she says THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE WORM...
All good. Not a stroke. We can't rule that out. But it sounds like a fainting spell. I have to stay with her, and call back if the situation worsens. I am to reassure her. My initial shock at her terrible slump is in the distant past.
You can't panic when you are handing out details to the emergency services. No one ever wants to dial 999. When the time came, I had no trouble with the service.
I was right to kill the music in the background. This was the work of mere seconds. And I know every second counts in case of a stroke...but I really wanted clarity on the other end of the phone. And the initial look wasn't strongly indicating stroke, so...
Luckily, she'd recovered and I was able to reassure her. It's important to introduce the concept of strangers in the house by making them not strangers.
We wait, and she recovers a bit more. I am watching for fits, shaking, vomiting, and I have to lie her on her side if we get to that last one.
No. She's fine. As fine as she can be, given the circumstances.
I hear the ambulance pull up. No sirens. A woman shouts hello from downstairs and up she comes with a rucksack on her back, scaling Mount Everest to get to us.
Her colleague follows soon after. We run through every test imaginable. Electrodes. A needle. Hands, waving. Smiles. Confirm her name.
What about a history of fainting?
She tells us that she fainted at school. I confirm this is a true story but it happened many decades ago. A bit of humour goes a long way here.
Tests are okay. Heart. Blood pressure. Ability to smile. We reconvene downstairs and she gets comfy. And now there's a choice.
We all hop in the ambulance and head to Accident & Emergency. Or the ambulance leaves and a doctor on call does the follow-up within four hours.
It's a tough one. But I think we'll wait for the doctor. Why? We'd end up sitting in A&E for hours on end at the weekend. Rule One of DO NOT GET ILL is DO NOT GET ILL.
And Rule Two of DO NOT GET ILL is DO NOT GET ILL AT THE WEEKEND.
I am ignoring the impending family visit.
She seems okay. If we have to call back, we phone 999 again. No messing about - on instruction of the ambulance crew. They retreat to do paperwork.
Something occurs to me, and I step out to talk to the crew. On the way back, I am stopped by a former neighbour I hadn't seen in years. Except for the day before. I'd seen her then.
She seemed to have fallen into the Fountain of Youth.
Well, she was back in the old town, and she wanted to know how things were. I said it just looked like fainting, and nothing more severe. You have to reassure everyone, when you are dealing with an emergency.
I leave her standing in her garden, as I have things to do. Keeping conversation going is one of those things, so I tell my mother that so-and-so was asking for her. I am to invite her in.
Strange atmosphere. But I do this. I invite her in. And I have the all-clear to continue with food and drink, so I load up with a hearty meal.
It wouldn't feed a sparrow. The hearty meal is in doses, and dose one is the tub pictured earlier. In comes the woman dipped in the Fountain of Youth.
She chats. Details are remembered and misremembered. The ambulance is still there and I step out to take the paperwork. In my absence, a hearty mini-meal is eaten.
The neighbour departs as I return. She's gone to the kitchen and placed the empty tub in the sink. That's how the tub got there. I know I have to go back and give them all the full story later.
I wait for family members who come in and wonder how she is. They weren't informed. This visit was planned. I insert the planned visit back into my flexible plans when I see the folks arrive.
In they come and I explain everything. Hours pass. About one minute short of four hours, in comes the doctor.
He checks for all sorts of things. I fill in the blanks. There'll be follow-up checks, of course. But he says I did the right thing. The ambulance people said I did the right thing. Everyone tells me I am doing great and I am doing all the right things.
No, that's never enough. There are another twenty items and a hundred offshoots and a thing and that other bit.
If that had been his mother, he'd have waited for the doctor rather than subject her to A&E on a hot Saturday afternoon. She'd be waiting more than four hours, and outside of the home environment that can only be distressing as fuck.
Laughter. Jokes. Smiles. She recovers. People go home. And I finally have time to go and talk to the neighbour and fill in more blanks.
I am no longer writing this on the day that it happened. Since then, there was a second ambulance call. I used the non-emergency service at night, and they were concerned enough to force an ambulance team on me.
Knowing an ambulance is coming, I warn the neighbour in advance that it's about to happen all over again. No shocks or surprises at seeing an ambulance in the street.
The nicest ambulance team in the world. They decided I was doing all the right things, and getting the right stuff done. These two women noticed a lot of detail. And they decided, all over again, that I was doing all the right things.
It's no one's fault that she's getting worse.
This is true.
Doesn't make it easier to take, even if it is at the front of the mind. We go through the business of letting the ambulance team leave. They sit in their vehicle, doing the paperwork.
It's dark. The security light gives off a glow. I remember the old streetlight that sat inside the garden. Newer, stronger, taller, brighter lights came in, and the great metal tree fell to progress.
The guys who removed it almost took the garden hut with the light, but that is as far as that anecdote goes.
I sit on the step, in the cooling night, staring around at the low-maintenance garden my mother created. It gets maintenance when I feel like escaping the unavoidable oppressive atmosphere of being a carer. Yes, I invent gardening jobs, just to give me something different to do.
The two women return, find me chilling on the step, enjoying the garden, and they commend me again. Too often, they've seen the same situation and the "carer", the "family member", doesn't provide any caring or sympathy or support. Just immediately wants to put the cared-for in the hospital.
And I don't want to do that. Several of the doctors I talk to don't want to do that. It's a lurching dance to stay out of hospital for as long as possible.
The two women hint that they've only scratched the surface of that argument. Then it's back to humour again, as we discover one of them has no singing voice. It's banter. And it is relief for them...
For, this time, they've been in attendance at a scene that wasn't absolute hell right here and right now.
Away they go. I see to things. And then, thinking I should check in with the neighbour before she checks in with me, I head for the door.
I open the door...
There, in the darkness, right in front of me is a woman dipped in the Fountain of Youth. She'd timed her visit to me to coincide with my visit to her.
It's spectral, seeing this woman standing in the light from the security lamp on the door, in that garden. A figure, illuminated...
Though barely. A ghost from out of the past. She looks as if I've bumped into her on the way to a cat-burglary. The truth is, she was about to knock but I opened the door before she could get near it.
I go along there and fill in the details of what didn't happen.
And here I am, using the material from last month in this month's blog post. The edited version. I can't cover everything that's been going on. Been busy seeing to all sorts of details.
Going to be busy, still. That part of being a carer never changes.
This post started with news of a massacre, and I can't fucking think what the fuck I was meant to write about. A massacre of rubber gloves, from ambulance personnel, maybe, was the closest thing to any massacre I could think of. I've been on the go like a blue-arsed fly all month, and it's okay to let some of that detail slide behind me into darkness.
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