DEMENTIA CARE: GENERAL MAINTENANCE.

Caring for someone isn’t about caring for someone in a room somewhere. There’s plenty to do away from that room. Why do I focus on that room? Mobility is an issue. To be specific, it’s the lack of mobility that is the issue. So caring centres around a room.
   With stairs being a no-go area now, that caring room is on the ground. If you haven’t made this sort of arrangement yet, prepare to do so later. Later. That’s variable. Sooner than later, if you want the honesty of experience.
   Okay. Caring has a focus around a person, and that person pretty much sticks to one place. There are wild excursions to the toilet. Vast epic journeys into the hall.
   On to the tale, though, of general maintenance. All the stuff that happens away from the room. Spring finally decided it is mostly here, now. The garden rustily springs into life. Time to check on garden supplies and outdoor maintenance. Keep the paths clear of weeds, in case of emergencies.
   In winter, the paths were mostly free of frost and snow. Rain was the big thing, in winter. I suspect rain may be the big thing in summer – and a watery bounty will turn the bushes lush with greenery and greenflies.
   I have a small arsenal of deadly weapons, hazardous to life and limb, that I’ll take to the paths. Specifically, I’ll take the weapons to the greenery on the paths. Some paths might accidentally suffer damage.
   If I leave the foliage unchecked, the rear path develops an S-shaped life of its own. Wend your way along. Turn here, swerve there, straighten out at the gate, and away you go. Picturesque as this is in bloom, it won’t do any favours to the emergency services if an ambulance callout is required.
   Tripping hazards shouldn’t be indoors at all, but…tripping hazards should be indoors rather than outdoors. I can’t exactly carpet the garden path for padding.
   As much as possible, to minimise time in the garden, I’ve made the leap to electrical gardening tools. Last year’s big hit was the electric weedkiller torture device. Heavy. Backpack-mounted. Powered by nuclear energy. I made some of that up.
   The major danger with the sprayer is that I may overbalance on a tricky patch of the garden and vanish into the weeds never to be seen again. Unless I’ve already sprayed that area. Then I’ll resurface once the weedkiller takes effect, after a long awkward pause.
   I’m playing a game of chance in setting the garden bin out in the street for collection. When the delivery day misfires in its entirety, you keep the bin out in the street until someone turns up to empty it. This disrupts all gardening being done, as I daren’t bring the bin in off the street to make foliage disposal more convenient.
   At any second the street might be ambushed by a bin lorry, and I’d hate to miss my shot. Yes, I’d like the bin next to me as I carve through the maze of weeds. But I’d like the near-full bin to be emptied this year. They move fast, those pick-up squads, and there are no second chances with the bins.
   There’s precious little grass to mow. The strimmer is the least-liked tool. I don’t care for the awkwardness of the extension cord. Battery-fuelled machines are preferable in the garden. The sprayer. And the Wheel of Doom. I don’t know what to call the Wheel of Doom, except that.
   It is battery-fuelled, and that matters most. I’ve given up on the wire brush that fits scrappily inside the cracks between large slabs of paving. Now I use a rotary version at the press of a trigger. Still as fiddly as the arm-powered version, it is, at least, far quicker.
   The garden, with its store of bins, reminds me that I must maintain the bins. I check levels frequently, and marshal the supplies inside the house with great care.
   Away from the room where the caring takes place, I use the kitchen as a staging-ground for the relentless advance of paper to the recycling centre by way of my bin. Incoming documents dealing with caring are all saved for the files. But the envelopes go to the shredder.
   I shred the cardboard packets the pills arrive in. No bin-raker needs to know the cocktail of drugs being shaken up inside.
   Indoor bins save me the bother of being rain-drenched. I go to the bins, all of the bins, the night before one bin goes out. And I fill them under the moonlight, with geese flying over in long wavering flapping strings of dots against the darkening sky with that spring chill on the air.
   I effect repairs here, there, and anywhere else I find broken things to fix. Sometimes I find broken things and struggle to realise what they’ve fallen, pinged, or exploded from. Screwdriver here. Pliers there. Hammer everywhere. Improvised this. Ad-libbed that.
   Caring comes at you in every room, when an outside organisation calls you and the phone at your hip warns of a problem in need of fixing or notes the arrival of a solution to a problem.
   General maintenance occurs with the brewing of coffee.
   Specific maintenance? Join the queue. One of the bins developed a crack, so I reported that immediately – knowing the crack will be a hole the size of the Grand Canyon by the time the maintenance crew arrives for an assessment. How long do assessments take? The annual hospital-style bed maintenance slipped from mid-summer to autumn when Covid broke loose.
   But that last autumnal inspection never happened at all, and I think they’ll adjust things so we go back to mid-summer again. Call it a small victory for a regular timetable in an irregular world. I had to fix the bed myself when it went awry. Fear not. The swallowing of patients by beds is strictly for comedy purposes, and is tired comedy at that.
   What does maintenance involve if you are a carer?
   First. Most important. If you live in a house with more than one floor, keep a separate toolkit on each floor. This saves much faffing about, wasting time looking for tools in an emergency. Yes, always plan for an emergency repair and not just a matter-of-fact repair.
   Break the house into areas. Not rooms. Areas. Inside each room, try to have an area that you can put, place, or throw things on. Staging-areas include empty corners, the tops of bookcases, small tables, and a mobile location called at-your-feet.
   At-your-feet is the most temporary staging-location of them all, lasting no more than a few seconds while you juggle many things in your hands or stop to answer the phone – while juggling many things in your hands. Equipment comes in. Find places to store equipment. Make room. Invent space.
   When things go out, though, they go out in stages. I need to put stuff in the loft. To do that, I go into the loft and see what should come down and go away. Things that go away can go to recycling. To the bins. Or to other people who can use things I’ve shoved out of the way for now.
   The loft is a version of at-your-feet, but with a longer duration. Boxes go there. Cardboard boxes for appliances that are still under guarantee and may need to be sent away for repair in the original boxes. With the guarantees expiring as we go along, it is wise to revisit the loft and cull the cardboard.
   That’s the best example of dealing with things in the loft. Removing cardboard boxes, in stages. First, check the appliance elsewhere. That’s an appliance that’s not even inside the house. Oops. Well, that box is going. It moves to the upper floor.
   With space around me, I unpack that box and remove cardboard inserts. Plastic bags and polystyrene wedges go in a separate pile. Now I have stuff for several bins. There might be a label on the side of the cardboard box with name and address – yes, that part of the cardboard box is ripped off and sent to the shredder.
   Then we’re off to the toolkit for the knife. Slash the cardboard down into convenient squares. Off we go, in stages. Cardboard goes to a collapsible crate on top of a set of shelving. The cardboard piles up and piles up until it is time to visit all the bins at once.
   Sometimes there’s a cardboard mountain, a surplus of corrugated brown squares and rectangles. The regular dosage of recyclable paper and card that leaves the house is overloaded by the stuff that comes down from the loft.
   Make sure your loft is a dynamic place. It sees the ebb and flow of the cardboard tide on a regular basis. You visit every room regularly. So make the loft into a room, in your head. A room full of staging-areas within staging-areas. If you can’t get the loft hatch open, I can’t help you. No one can. Don’t let things get to that stage.
   General maintenance is general. It happens in the gardens. All the way up to the loft. Caring for someone happens in rooms the cared-for can no longer even reach. In areas the cared-for rarely went into, even before the dementia was a thing. That loft being the best example.
   When I took over, I turned the loft into a place that was used regularly for storage. I’ll be back there, shortly, assessing what can go to the bins. Spring is a time for cleaning, after all. Though that doesn’t act as an excuse to avoid clearing rubbish out for the rest of the year.
   Caring isn’t just about caring for someone. It is about emptying the bins and filling them again. Regulate the rubbish, and you’ll keep the house ready for the addition of new caring equipment. Adding the bed meant ditching a whole load of furniture. It went for refurbishment, for use by people who needed it.
   So. Caring is about caring. About the bins. And about the bare minimum of gardening required to escape the garden in an emergency. Now I must leave, and see if the gardening bin has been picked up and emptied.