That’s when you hope your five steps ahead
are four steps ahead and not twenty steps behind. Every random challenge risks
spawning another and another until you are out in the street with your house on
fire.
I have no clue when I’ll
publish this post. It’s likely that I’ll try to post it in the first week of
September. That’s the plan.
Depends on how my week goes. It’s mid-week
as I type, and I am having the scrappiest week as a carer. Random bullshit jumps
for my throat, cuts me off at the knees, smashes through my meals, and leaves a
steaming rhino turd on my path. Where’s the rhino?
What do I do in response? I improvise. Most
of the things that happened this week were small or started small. The big problem
with help, a change to routine that’s meant to improve the situation, is this:
every item of help you add to the list itself becomes an obstacle on that same
list.
Twice this week I sustained
an eye-injury. That’s okay. I have two eyes. Unfortunately, the entirely
separate injuries went to the left eye on one day and the right eye very early
on another morning.
The first hit could’ve been horrifically
worse, but I got lucky. And the second one would’ve been disastrous, but my
skull took the brunt of it. The worst thing, though, was a slashing I took to a
finger when trying to avoid opening evil plastic packaging.
It’s the finger thing that really annoys me.
I knew the evil plastic packaging was evil. And I took every piece of care. For
a second there, it seemed that I’d utterly avoided the evil plastic fangs
lurking in front of me.
Seeming is not reality – seeming is merely
daydreaming optimism into existence.
Slash.
Fucking fucking hell.
Not just FUCKING HELL.
No.
Fucking fucking hell.
Cuts and scrapes and thumps
and bangs. Try to avoid those. Paperwork is unavoidable, and I had to deal with
pointless messages, nonsensical interruptions, absurd moments, and random
bizzarity. Nothing to do with the off-the-wall nature of dementia. Everything
to do with the randomness that goes hand-in-hand with dementia.
I deal with random dementia-related actions.
Routine covers some things. Improvisation is part of routine and covers almost
everything else. Then the outside world intrudes and you are asked to handle
this bit of paperwork that you shouldn’t have to deal with.
Monday morning rolled in and flattened
everything. The system let me down. I switched to Plan B. Plan B just barely
cut it, but I called that a win. When the miniature emergency was over…
I switched to ritual. And the
ritual is this. I walk back inside, rain or shine, and I have that fucking
coffee with that fucking chocolate biscuit. Maybe there’s some fucking
swearing. Or I lose myself in the crunch of food and the elixir of life that is
caffeine-based and most welcome.
Yes, I’ve been super-cool for
the ambulance callouts. No, I’ve been a bag of nerves jangling like a bag of
spanners held over a crate of sweating dynamite when dealing with the most
trivial thing. There’s no pattern to it. That is the point. It’s a
rollercoaster ride with no seatbelts. Can’t have it any other way.
Here I am, moving away from
that scrappy week. It grew scrappier and crappier as the days unfolded. You are
overwhelmed in this slow death by a thousand paper-cuts. I have no clue what
happened after the scrappy week was long over and those cuts healed. But, for
unknown reasons, a few fingertips and both tips of my thumbs came down with an
attack of something or other.
I hefted a load of cardboard, but the
damaged skin didn’t look as though it’d been attacked by cardboard. The cuts I
hate most are the cuts I don’t feel. Later there’s an unexplained bruise or an
impossible slash. I’m busy with other things.
August was scrappy. A long premature Autumn,
punctuated by heatwaves of truly variable length. Summer, fighting back as it
lost its grip. Now what? August barely into September, and full-on late
September rain ushered the month in.
Every five minutes, sunshine.
I am making more and more
changes to help keep the place tidy. The immediate side-effect of this is to
clutter the place with all the packaging that organisers came in. Furniture
must be wrapped in polystyrene cocoons and cardboard shrouds.
It’s no good. Boxes and bags and cartons and
even more bags and cartons and bags and boxes. The supermarket stopped
delivering stuff in bags. I unceremoniously dump the crate onto the kitchen
floor, unless I am following the milk rule. Go on. Guess. That’s right. I flip
each bottle of milk into the air and launch it at the fridge with a baseball
bat. Have not lost a drop yet.
Small victory. No more plastic bags from the
supermarket. Major defeat. Excess amounts of cardboard. I bought a new bin in.
Larger. At least it didn’t come wrapped in cardboard. I was surprised at that.
My question for September is
this. Where did the fucking year go?
I review the year. Another mild winter.
Can’t last. I know I’ll have to buy supplies in. There are more opportunities
for escorting the carer along an icy path, now that daycare visits are such a
huge part of routine.
But I hold off, chancing it, and leave
winter and the start of the year behind without heavy snow or ice on that path.
The long pre-Autumn jogs my memory, and I order a huge bag of salt and a box to
store it in.
The box is cancelled. Damaged in transit. I
still receive a notification that the box, up for a refund, will reach me by
post. A perfectly fine replacement storage box turns up. And a few hours later,
a delivery driver struggles along the path with more cardboard for me.
I have no clue what this is. He guesses bird
seed. I realise it is the bag of salt, in a box. After he’s gone, I disappear
into that cupboard and drop the bag next to the box. If I just heft the whole
bag up in that unwieldy way, I’ll spill salt all over the uncarpeted cupboard
floor, and salt will live in the cracks between the floorboards for all time.
Instead, I make use of the scoop that came
with the box, and I spend time carefully scooping salt into the large sealable
container. Calming moments. Texture of granules. Smell of it all. Spreading the
salt into the corners at the bottom of the tub.
Gradually filling the box and emptying the
bag. I reach a reasonable tipping-point, and heft the bag, spilling nothing.
Powder acts as fluid, dropping like a waterfall into position. I tidy up the
plastic packaging and the cardboard waste, and seal the box.
My hope is that I won’t need that this
winter. At least it is there. Along with the brushes for clearing the path of
light snow, and the shovels for dealing with the heavy snowfall that rarely
comes. Ice will come to fear the salt. If ice forms.
I prepare for winter as
summer turns to Autumn. Well, they are only going to jack the price of salt up
when the first frosty mornings threaten. It’s been a little over three months
since the carers, who are mostly drivers, spoke of frost forming on sparkly May
mornings. They rise early, and see the world in a different way.
August was full of repairs.
Replacements. Revisiting things, evaluating, and dealing with bullshit. I had
one utterly bollocks official conversation over the telephone. And I dealt with
one utterly bollocks official conversation online. I’m glad to have months with
no official bullshit to deal with.
My curse is that I prepare. Luckily, there’s
a plan in reserve for dealing with people who don’t prepare. Improvise. And I
recommend an air of improvisational preparation to you all, whether you care
for people or not.
Lately I’ve been fixing things and…I managed
to clear most of a room. There are steps to make in clearing another room and
fixing up the loft. Everything must be tidier. Streamlined. Easy to navigate in
an emergency. I’m getting there.
Damn it, I am late for a coffee. Well, only
by a few minutes. Let’s call that improvising a finish to this blog post and
ad-libbing the flight-time of that coffee. Unless my computer dies an
electronic death, looks as though I’ll be posting this blog effort on the first
day of September. We’ll call that a win. And the bonus that goes with the win
is a cup containing caffeine.
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