DEMENTIA CARE: BEING LATE.

Yes, I am very late with this blog post. I’m not only merely late – I’m really most sincerely late. With a lot on my plate. Chicken nuggets, these days. I fully intended to write a blog entry at the start of the month. And then more than half of the month sneaked past me. I’m typing this up as I wait for the carers to come in.
   The carers are late. As those letters hit the page, the carers arrive. They are always terribly apologetic for being ten minutes behind the official time. Early morning visits that turn out a bit late contribute to the creation of a massive snowball that consumes the known universe as it rattles down the mountainside. Sometimes lateness starts early.
   Avalanche. The rule’s the same, no matter the severity of the avalanche. Don’t eat the yellow snow. It wasn’t yellow a moment ago, but then, it wasn’t an avalanche a moment ago.
   When the carers are genuinely really late, by half an hour, all I can do is wait for them. There is no point phoning. Certainly not at the weekend, when the out-of-hours “hotline” becomes the standard form of communication – one step above smoke signals in rain.
   If the carers are really truly unbelievably late, or expect to be late, they phone me. It is rare that I must phone HQ. How long do you wait when you are waiting? An hour is about the limit, beyond which I have to phone in, but I give them an hour. What causes these delays?
   Vehicle trouble. Engines drop out. Wheels fall off. Brakes refuse to clamp up or unclamp at all.
   Sudden violent illness on the squad. Choose your next breakfast carefully, Mr Bond, it may be your last.
   Death of someone being looked after in the system. I’ve known two responses to this. A carer on the team hasn’t had this happen before, and she is taken off the shift – particularly if she gets to like the client. I heard this one through the magic grapevine that passes from carer to carer.
   Carers are told, sternly, that they are not allowed to have any favourites, and with good reason. Elderly care never ends well.
   The second response is from veteran carers who faced this ordeal many times before. They move to the next job on the list, just to give themselves something to do. Work is a quick fix that night. If they leave the shift as a team, that pushes everyone else out of place and lateness abounds. So, no. They carry on.
   What else makes the carers late? It’s a long list, and a mad one. We’ll stick to the highlights…
   A new carer, unfamiliar with the general location, gets a wee bit lost on awkward streets.
   Well, of course I live on an awkward street. That’s my life in a nutshell.
   Traffic trouble. In a splenetic frenzy to spend the remaining road budget before it evaporates into next year’s accounting figures, the diggers and tar-layers are out in force – and you find all the roads are gone for a day or two. With plenty of warning. Oh yes.
   Then there’s the mighty snowball itself. A slight spillage here, a clean-up there, a technical glitch with powered equipment: these delays are snowball delays. Carers told me they were on the first job of the day and gained access almost half an hour earlier than usual…
   But they spent twice as long on the allotted job, thanks to those pesky unforeseen circumstances. Half an hour early for a half-hour job that lasts an hour. One step forward and two steps sideways in an unexpected spot of Wild West dancin’.
   Typically, carers are twenty minutes late to me after four jobs that overran by five minutes a piece. Some days, they play catch-up all day long. People are dragged in to cover elsewhere at the beginning, middle, and end. Overtime is a spectre that haunts the day and rules the night. It is arranged by telephone from HQ at the last second. Usually five minutes after that.
   Lateness causes lateness. There’s a formula for that, but I don’t have the time to type it out for you.
   So what happens when the carers reach my door? They know there’s a massive chance that they will get through everything on time or a little more quickly than usual. There are hardly ever any delays in here.
   When they turn up a bit late and tell me they are going to be running very late on the next tricky customer visit, no matter what they do, I try to smooth things over as well as any human could. Been thinking about bringing in a fantastic robot for the complicated stuff – like going to the toilet.
   If I could have a fantastic robot step in and go to the toilet on my behalf, I could be doing other things on the carer side of the business. There’s nothing more awkward than suddenly having to go, and knowing you can’t, as you are dealing with being a carer, and also welcoming daily carers in.
   This happens just when the postie delivers a parcel and a nearby dormant fault-line kicks into action with an earthquake of epic proportions – knocking over a bin. Y’know. All the usual stuff.
   So you don’t go. You wait. If I had a robot to do all that, I’d get a robot to do everything else as well. Hell, I’d have a robot to order in even more robots. Anyway, I don’t like to add to delay to others when routine snowballs and the carers are late to me. I am slowing someone else down, further along the line. Maybe three customers down the railway tracks.
   And I know, from what the carers say to me, that those other places don’t have people like me standing in the wings, ready to provide assistance. So, as a carer, I find myself caring for people who are going to be seen to later in the day. Other individuals I’ll never meet.
   A bit of organisation here saves precious minutes that are endlessly redeployed elsewhere. No, I don’t like slowing things down here. I want the carers in and out as smoothly as possible, so that there’s minimal disruption elsewhere. As well as minimal disruption here, obviously.
   Being late with a blog post is fine. Carers being late to my door. Fine. But if I complicate things and mess up for people further down the line…that’s not fine. Why care about these other unknown people? I’m a carer. What a shocker.
   Now I have one feverish eye on the clock, as I am expecting a parcel delivery later. My blog post won’t interrupt that. There are other deliveries to take in and orders I must send out. At some point, pills are going to be delivered by the pharmacy. If those pills are late, it’s back to rationing out what I have until the pill delivery turns up.
   At its worst, the pill service would be a week late. I order a week in advance of the pills running out. Even if the service gets its gears caught in a messy delay, we are still, for the most part, okay on the pill front. For reasons of responsibility in medicine, I am not permitted to order more than a week in advance: so, a week in advance it is.
   When it comes to clinic appointments…there are hardly any clinic appointments. If those can be conducted over the telephone, or through an e-mail exchange, then they will be. Covid took away the concept of lateness for almost all clinical appointments.
   In rare cases with a need to be there in person, we are there in person well ahead of time, every time. The weather battles traffic and traffic surrenders to lateness – but you went well ahead of time, and that bonus time cushioned the blow.
   What do you learn from turning up early to an appointment? You learn that your appointment comes and goes and they see you a little later than expected. But don’t be a minute late, once, not ever – or they’ll start that appointment without you. It’s one of the laws of physics that applies to hospitals and rocket launches, equally.
   Lateness takes many forms. I don’t sleep in late. That’s not an option, as a carer. I am, however, never in bed before midnight. As the hour grows late and the evening wears on, carer duties fade and I can catch a movie. No interruptions. Clinics are all shut down. No one is going to phone me at night. I don’t have to be on call, except for a massive emergency right in front of me.
   You’d think I’d be early to bed and early to rise, but this is not so. Carers do need time away from caring, on a daily basis. Always make the time to find the time to use the time in a timely fashion as time goes by.