DEMENTIA CARE: DEALING WITH INJURY AS A CARER.

What’s the main source of injury, as a carer? The world, and all its contents. Different forms of caring will lead to specific occupational hazards. Let’s consider a few of the obvious ones.
   Every piece of caring equipment that sneaks into the house is a thumping, bumping, and tripping hazard. This is especially true of mobility equipment. Admittedly, I’d find it hard to trip over the hoist now that it is located in the ceiling…
   But the floor model was a danger to life and limb. I’d watch two carers struggle to wheel the monster into position over a very thin carpet as I would glide across the same surface knowing that the comfy chair I pushed, loaded with a passenger, had much better wheels on it.
   We were threatened with a replacement hoist which was…shudder…“bigger” in some way. But they’d have had to take out a fence, two doors, and a wall just to squeeze that in. Luckily, sanity, or the budget, prevailed.
   What of that comfy chair? It is a very comfy chair. Foolishly, I recently walked back and bumped into it while the damned thing was fortunately empty, and there was the bit about falling securely into the comfiest of landing-spots. Better than being roughly deposited on the very thin carpet.
   As far as floor hoists are concerned, be thankful that you don’t have a shaggy carpet you could lose a sheepdog in. Bare floors, hospital floors, are the best floors for hoists that live on the ground. Even thin carpets prove difficult.
   The danger areas for all forms of caring are…
   A loft. You could fall from it or, worse, through it.
   The stairs. You run the risk of falling down those. Or, very undignified, you might even slide down them in that bumpy-bumpy-bumpy fashion that dishes out more bruises than you thought possible.
   In the kitchen. The danger of electric shock is present in almost every room, save the toilet and the bathroom. If you are reading this while American, that last bit doesn’t apply to you. On this rainy side of the Atlantic, we don’t have electrical sockets inside toilets or bathrooms. If reading this while American, you may find the non-electrical arrangement strange.
   Things are designed that way to stop people toasting bread at the bathside, which is never a good idea.
   But back to the kitchen, which also has gas.
   The big danger I find hard to avoid lurks only in the kitchen, as sharp as a shark hiding under the surface of a spooky-calm bay. Waiting to pounce. Or, in this case, ready to slice. The kitchen shark is perfectly safe until used.
   What is it? It is a thing that can drastically reduce my ability to type. For it is metal, and goes after your fingers. It hides on the underside of those pill strips. I guess that’s the top and not the underside of the pill-delivery device.
   To pop pills out, I turn the strip over, so I can push down and release the pills into my hand, or onto the counter if the medicine slips my grasp.
   Mostly, this is painless. Once in a blue moon, the silvery seal splits and turns into the vorpal sword. That’s when the shark bites, slashing my fingers to varying degrees. First there are the cuts that aren’t even felt. No blood. Just escaped the deluge. Lucky.
   Then there’s the amputation by tiny slash – the pain goes all the way to your shoulder and back again. Or there’s the tiniest cut that emits no pain, yet spatters blood up four walls and into half the garden.
   Worse, far worse, is the double-slash that takes out a finger on each hand. Priorities. Keep blood off the pills. That’s if you notice the cut. With no pain and no sign of blood, there’s nothing to do.
   Later, though, long after you’ve popped all those pills into the daily container, making sure Monday’s pills are in Monday’s compartment, you may find a scattershot trail of fading red all across the kitchen.
   Blood. Well, I don’t feel any pain. The stains are smeared across things I’ve picked up. So I have a cut on my hand, somewhere. Or your skin takes a dip in a substance that sends throbbing pain to the moon and back. Then you know you were the victim of a slashing.
   I assemble a basket of five pills per day, across two weeks of pill-popping time, in a matter of minutes – using two of those containers marked for the days of the week. There’s a third container which stands empty of pills, with a few daily lids popped off – they tell me when to administer a sachet – made from paper-backed foil. This metal is everywhere.
   I could arrange the pills on a daily basis. But I prefer to have everything ready to go, week by week. The system? One set of pills ready for that week, and another set of pills in reserve. When I’m down to the last week of pills, I order more for the next month.
   The production line is, for my money, the way to go. I’d rather risk slashing my fingers once a fortnight than several times each day. This reduces, though doesn’t eliminate, the danger in the kitchen.
   Milk is another source of pain, right there in the fridge. For milk has the same foil seal problem going for it. If you uncork the bottle for the first time and remove the metal seal in a rip that takes half of the metal away, you now have a jagged weapon in one hand and a jagged weapon still attached to the bottle.
   Carefully, as though disposing of a bomb, you turn to the sink and rinse the jagged instrument in your hand. The other danger is letting milk build up in the recycling bin, so you must wash the damaged metal slice. No dairy in the bin. We can’t have that. They send at least twenty people to your house in bulky spacesuits, fit a tent over the building, and spray stuff that just never comes off the walls.
   Back to the sink. You develop fifteen different methods of removing the half-lid. Some of those involve losing blood. When all the milk-suds are washed out of the sink, and long-after that day’s pills are distributed, with the blood wiped off the ceiling, then, and only then, do you reach for the bandages and laudanum.
   Trivial things cut you, when you’re a carer. And that is sometimes a literal matter. I watched my mother fold like a foldy thing from exhaustion, in such a way as to mimic death. And I casually wondered if she’d died. A big thing in life. And I didn’t bat an eyelid.
   But being slashed by the metal sheet that holds the pills in? You’ll see me roll my eyes so hard that they bowl from one side of the kitchen to the other, knocking milk bottles down like nine-pins.
   Anything that affects your fingers affects everything you do as a carer. With the mess dealt with, pretty much, you turn to your stash of First Aid goods. Clean the wound. Bind the wound. Arrange a temporary fix that stops your finger trailing blood everywhere as though you’re in a story by Poe. The Tell-Tale Thumb.
   The big bad things are easy to take. But the trivial will make you die a thousand deaths every fucking time. The day after I slashed my finger, guess what…yes. I slashed another finger. One on the pill foil and one on the milk foil.
   Foiled and foiled again.
   That I have a First Aid box handy in the kitchen tells you I am prepared to deal with being slashed in the kitchen. Funnily enough, I am far more careful with knives. I tried to develop a technique for dealing with pills…
   But familiarity breeds contempt. Especially when there is a change, and the familiar becomes unfamiliar for a while. Even more contempt, then. The pills stay the same, as far as ingredients go, but the shape of the pills occasionally changes. And the packaging changes to accommodate the differing shape…
   So my well-worn safety routine bites the dust, and I am slashed again. Then, once a new phase of the blue moon kicks in, the pills change yet again. My fingers remain the same targets. I’ve yet to slash an elbow.
   What’s the main source of injury, as a carer? The world, and all its contents. Being a carer is the main source of injury, as a carer. What knocks the daily carers out? Back pain from moving and handling. Covid from…who knows where.
   The daily carers offer to dish out the pills for you. They wear gloves, and would lose gloves before they lost skin. But then they’d lose gloves and have to glove up again. Even if they dished out the pills, I’d feel obliged to arrange them in the daily compartments anyway.
   And I know well which pills must be crushed and put in milk and which can be take whole with the drink. Anyway, the most annoying form of injury, besides slamming a knee into wooden furniture, is the foil cut – two days in a row. Once from pills, and again from a plastic milk bottle.
   How do I deal with this problem? Elastoplast. Technically, I don’t deal with the problem at all. It keeps happening. There is no known solution. I am careful. But never careful enough. It’s important not to be careful enough. That’s how we learn to be a bit more careful, while caring.