DEMENTIA CARE: EVERYTHING MUST GO. IN SMALL DOSES.

Every piece of mobility equipment that comes in…is a tripping hazard. That’s one point. The other point about mobility equipment is that it comes and goes as mobility changes.
   This leads me to the wider thing. Equipment devours space. We couldn’t get a wheelchair in until a chair was already in place. You don’t sit in a wheelchair once you are out of the bed if you can sit in a comfortable chair.
   They called it the comfy chair. It replaced a piece of equipment that I’d bought in. That went to charity when it left. We’d gone from a chair that tipped forward to help you stand up to a chair that tilted back so you wouldn’t fall out of it.
   That second chair was a requirement of receiving a custom-fitted wheelchair for visits to clinics. For a short time, two chairs took up space. Then one chair. And finally one chair and one wheelchair.
   Caring equipment consumes the house. Before the ceiling hoist, there was the hoist on the floor. Most of the floor. It dominated the room. Everything comes in. And eventually, everything must go. But let it go in small doses.
   What are the crowded areas? If the main room is the bridge of the ship, where all the caring decisions are made, then the engine room is far below decks, down in the kitchen. Gradually, caring equipment slid in…
   And by that, I mean kitchen gadgets that made cooking more convenient. If the refrigerator died, there was a spare refrigerator. The one-cup kettle is handy for many purposes. Thirty seconds and you have warm water. Very useful if, on rare occasions, the hot water system has broken down just before the carers arrive.
   Microwave. Fast. Air fryer. Also fast. Soup maker. Occupies your time in a good way. Gets you making food you’d want to eat. Towel rails. Everywhere. Making use of space that isn’t being used.
   Bins in the kitchen. You choose your battlefield with bins in the kitchen. Going to the bins in the garden? Not in that downpour. So, yes, shove the recyclable cardboard in the garden bin some other time. Use the bins in the kitchen.
   Furniture goes to charity and now you have room for a hospital bed in the main room. Space is important. You make better use of it. But it’s never enough. There are two important places here worth mentioning…
   One is the loft. Things go there, out of the way for a time, and then I can dispose of them in small doses. You recycle things. Or send them to charity. The local authority will take bulky items away for refurbishment when possible. Free service.
   And the same local council will cart away bulky items that can’t be saved. They’ll do so for a small fee.
   The other place worth mentioning is connected to the loft. But only spiritually. There’s a hut in the garden. That’s where used items go to die. If there’s a list, a backlog, a queue, for getting rid of bulky items, the hut will take them in the meantime.
   From the hut to the street is a short walk to the gallows. It’s convenient. I try to keep the hut and the loft active. Yes, there are things that stay in the loft for a long time. But I need to keep most items cycling through.
   Right now I am revisiting the loft. Making it a safer place to move around in…by setting more things up for the bin. It’s been crowded up there of late as I deal, very actively, with items clogging up the downstairs levels of the house.
   Where the hell am I going to put all this stuff? The loft or the hut. And if the loft…to the hut not long after.
   I set up three dead bookcases for disposal. They had their time. Yes, they were useful. But they couldn’t go to charity. Not in that state. I was forced to repair them so I could dispose of them.
   Being wedged in between other bookcases was the only thing holding them together. Bad design. I know that as I had to watch a video to see how to build them up again…and a lot of design features had changed down the years.
   Why did I have to build them up again? My repairs were temporary. Provided they held together long enough for the guy to throw them into the lorry, we were golden. They won’t take anything that’s unsafe to lift.
   Also, the uplift fee is per item. And if you dismantle the bookcase, the bits and pieces are still too large to go in a standard bin…which means you are charged by the individual item for the bulky waste collection.
   One item becomes eight items. Dispose of three intact bookcases or 24 items. Let me think about that. Which is cheaper? Hmmm. While I am prepared to dispose of things in small doses, I’m not going to break them up into micro-doses of rubbish.
   Anyway…I would reconstruct a bookcase, and build an order around it. You pay the fee whether you are putting out one item or a bunch of things. I put out a bunch of things and a bookcase.
   It’s a matter of not clogging the streets with three bookcases at once. So, on a weekly basis, I disposed of the dead bookcases. And other things. The loft filled up. Then the hut accepted things from the loft. And the hut expelled items to the street. It’s like a journey through the mouth to the stomach and out the other end.
   The regular bins were in full use during this period of reflection. What goes next? Uncrowd the main floors. Fill the loft. Navigate the space up there like Spider-Man on a mission. Don’t fall through to the floor below.
   It’s not enough. I had to clear the loft more efficiently without breaking arms and legs. One side of the loft was easier to deal with. I cleared that. This now gives me room to deal with the cluttered end.
   I could see more clearly. And I spotted a sagging piece of shelving up there. Everything came off the shelf, I removed the shelf, I reinforced the storage, and when I put everything back…I could see even more clearly. If you suddenly have a huge space to fill, then you fill it more efficiently.
   This was a hell of an effort. But I tackled it in small doses. Day by day, week by week. And now I am blogging about the results. What now? I’ve identified things that have to go. And go they will.
   I’m making use of the uplift service weekly. Goodbye to that spare roll of carpet that is never going to be used for anything. There’s a terrible phrase…
   You never know when you might need one of those.
   For unknown reasons, you apply this to EVERYTHING. Clearly, though, you are never going to need one of those. And look at the state of it, now. It has to go. For sentimental reasons, you don’t want to clear out someone else’s property…
   Also, when you take control of a dementia-sufferer’s life…you don’t want to take control of everything immediately. Try as much as possible to leave reasonable decisions to the person affected.
   I’ve been a carer ten years. Gradually, I took over responsibility for every aspect of someone else’s life. There are things I can throw away now. In small doses. But those things are in separate categories…
   They sit next to each other in the loft, in a cupboard, in a hallway, in the hut. Some are best sent to charity. Other items can definitely go to recycling. Then there are things that must go away to live on a nice farm in the countryside.
   And now, I’ve decided to try another small dose of recycling/disposal. I’ve hired a bag. It’s like a skip but smaller. A skip is too large. But the bag is in a small dose, and should prove useful.
   Again, I look at categories of things that must go. This bag is going to take stuff for recycling and material for dumping. It takes things the local authority won’t remove. But the local authority will take things that the bag service won’t remove.
   I’m now covering all the options and removing just that little bit more. There’s a tonnage limit. I’ve looked at the size of the bag and I know what it can take as it is lifted by crane. As I look around at the hordes of books on my shelves, I perform a few rough calculations.
   The tonnage estimate for books on my shelves is…frightening.
   So what’s next? More strengthening and reorganisation of the loft, making it even safer. Removing things from the loft to the hut. And then a jigsaw puzzle, filling the bag for its departure.
   So much stuff. Best to dispose of it in small doses.
   You never know when you might need one of those.
   Believe me. You’ll never need one of those, and you should ditch it as soon as possible. Best bet? Give it to someone who thinks they’ll never know when they might need one of those. You never know…maybe they’ll actually take it.