DEMENTIA CARE: TINY MONUMENTAL CHANGES TO ROUTINE.

The world of dementia care is a world of uncertainty for both parties: cared for and carer. You’d think the carer is there to provide a great degree of certainty. No. Routine must be established, true. But then you realise that routine is a luxury. Caring gets in the way of routine. You must adapt and adapt again to survive.
   Something lands in your eye, a speck of dust, a tiny thing, but you were flying through the air with the greatest of ease…and now you’ve missed catching the flying trapeze. Earth calls to you. You can’t dodge it. Thud. You land. Pop your legs back in the right position and stand up. Clear your eye. Carry on.
   Routine is a collection of sub-routines, mini-routines, last-minute fixes, alterations to the plans that were already altered five minutes before, and random stuff that keeps you going. You have a plan. And it shifts. It changes slightly. But it is THE PLAN. The plan of keeping the plan going. That wing fell off. Quick, grow a new one. The engine died. Give it month-to-month resuscitation. Keep going. Until you need to stop for a second. Then keep going.
   Things throw off your day, mes
   I was interrupted by a call from the pharmacy, offering to deliver pills this afternoon. The woman who called threw off her own plan to talk to me and just flat out offered to send stuff. Then she laughed and said she should have mentioned that she was calling from the pharmacy. Normally, she does that first.
   Obviously, the phone itself told me the pharmacy was calling, but that’s just a detail.
   Things, like calls from the pharmacy, throw off your day, mess with your routine, and generate more routine on top of the routine you had planned. So what was my routine, just now? First of the month. Blog today if I can. Be a carer, whether I can or can’t.
   I expected to be torn away from this desk to take in parcels. Not yet. I have at least two parcel notification updates for today, and one of those was within the last hour. I check these and refresh the tabs on the computer just in case I’m not going to receive an e-mail or text.
   The pharmacy. I’d given up hope of hearing from the pharmacy this week. That was the last-gasp chance to receive a call. In the afternoon, it is too late to receive a call offering an afternoon delivery, especially on a Friday. I know this, as I was once called by the pharmacy over this situation. A second call came in after five minutes. It is too late to arrange that delivery. The delivery guy is already out, doing the rounds.
   No big deal. That afternoon shaped up to be a busy one for me, and one fewer thing to deal with was okay in my book. Anyway. No parcels yet. But the last-ditch effort by the pharmacy, to reach me in time with minutes to spare, solved a pill problem but gave me something else to listen out for.
   And now I am playing the waiting game, three times over. At least two parcels. And one delivery of pills. My afternoon routine now includes setting up the next batch of medicinal help. The pill box has one day left in it. Saturday. And I have a few spare pills to last the weekend…so a Monday delivery would have worked out okay.
   I was interrupted through the week by text messages from the local surgery. Doctors were in short supply, through illness. Also, there was a training day this week. During this difficult time please stay away if you can. I stay away to minimise Covid risks.
   Would the surgery disruption feed through to pharmacy order confirmations? Maybe. I’d put out the order on Sunday night with a week’s pills left. You can’t order more than one week in advance. All going well, I receive a call mid-week. A Wednesday special. But with the staff shortage and training, maybe the remaining doctors would be slightly behind on confirming prescriptions. A day at most.
   Every delay feeds into every other delay. If anything slows down a prescription, it’s the availability of dietary supplements. But it seems we’re good to go this afternoon. I’ve veered off into this talk of pills after receiving a phone call about pills.
   Tiny changes to your day will affect your whole day, sometimes. So your plan is to have the plan. It’s a rolling plan, that rattles over every bump in the road. If it slides into a yawning pit, you move with speed so that the plan keeps rolling fast enough to come up spinning like hell on the other side, ready for the next ten bumps in your journey.
   Tuesday was frosty. Very frosty. Hadn’t seen that level of cold in a while. This heating is taking forever to come on today. I check the radiator. Stone cold. The error message said the heating pump died. I made the call. To my surprise, the engineers turned up on the same morning.
   But there I was, juggling extra things. I had to keep an eye out for the engineers, hoping they didn’t clash with the carers. And I was expecting a pharmacy call and some parcels. As well as shopping being delivered. And a few other things. On top of that, actual caring duties.
   Gadgets are your friends. I have a one-cup kettle that provides warm water in thirty seconds. Below boiling. No heating means no water. The shower is on a separate system, and I had warm water for that. I expected the carers before the engineers. As soon as they walk in, says the rolling plan, I hit the kettle and drop a few cups of warm water in the basin,
   Interrupted.
   There’s the first parcel dealt with. I spent ages bursting the inflatable packaging so I could dispose of it without taking up an entire wheelie bin with air.
   As soon as those carers walk in, says the rolling plan, I hit the kettle and drop a few cups of warm water in the basin, and they are ready to work.
   That’s not how it played out. The carer phoned me and said delay fed into delay and they’d be really delayed in getting to me. Okay. Nothing to do about that. Just deal with the problem. Carers regularly apologise for being late, even though it isn’t their fault. As long as they turn up at some point, everything works out.
   Then the carers arrived shortly after. Yes, they were late. But they weren’t LATE late. An opening appeared in the workload, and they saved a great deal of time just after phoning me. I explained the hot water situation. Off to the kettle. Carers left. Engineers arrived.
   I cleaned up the kitchen while I waited. It’s amazing the things you leave there, waiting to be tidied. You know a heating engineer is coming, and you’ll have to keep busy. So, yes, I plan to NOT do stuff so that I can do that stuff later if required.
   The heating pump would die last. Before that, the sensor would give up the ghost and lie to me. Tell me the pump was done. Not true. There wasn’t a part. It would arrive soon. Wednesday. The sensor was temporarily fixed, but it was best to put in a new one. If it broke down again on Tuesday, I was to call it in and there’d be a very temporary temporary fix.
   I was warned that stores might not be able to match the part to the appointment. The heating was on. Result, I say. The engineers left. I took in the shopping and heard nothing from the pharmacy. Then the woman from stores phoned and asked if we could shift that fix from Wednesday to Thursday. Yes.
   Obviously, I have to say I’LL BE IN ALL DAY. Now I’d play the waiting game over Wednesday, hoping I wouldn’t have to call out the engineers for a very temporary temporary fix. Thursday arrived and so did the engineer. He mucked around with a lot of watery sounds and told me that was it.
   If something attacks your routine and it is minor, it can still go after your whole routine. As soon as the heating was back on, I kept having these minor disruptions. Waiting for a pharmacy phone call, I received a call from stores. I know I can put one line on hold while I deal with a second call, but I’ve never used this function.
   Something else to adapt to, if it happens. Two clinics phone in the afternoon, say, choosing the same minute.
   And now, a second parcel. No pills, yet. I arranged a few things when I was in the kitchen, including biscuits. Don’t interrupt my biscuits.
   I’ve dealt with the washing. And the drying. Considering doing another load of washing. About to prepare a meal. No pills so far. I’ve performed a bit of household maintenance to make room for many things. And I’ve taken delivery of so many parcels this week that I had to fill the reserve cardboard bins. The wheelie bin is too full, and must wait an age before emptying. In dog years, it’s a lot.
   So my rolling plan was to shred stuff to save space. Done. Now the shredder is full. And the small indoor bin is full. A temporary fix. Now a sea of cardboard washes in, and I adapt to the use of the reserve cardboard vaults. At least I managed a quick blog post out of this. With interruptions.