DEMENTIA CARE: I PUT MY HAND TO THE DOOR.

Routine. You’d think routine, for a dementia carer, revolves around food. The selection and preparation of it. But there’s routine in everything. Why? Dementia is random, and so there can be no fixed routine.
   Your overall routine is to do what you do, and with a minimum of fuss. Call that a win. I get asked about Christmas and New Year. Now how did they go? Quietly. Nothing to report. In other words, no crisis, drama, fuss, apocalypse, or nonsense. A quiet time is a great thing.
   I minimise my risk. Whether that’s going to the bin or cooking a meal. The harshest event I faced recently was knocking a glass of coffee to the floor. I couldn’t save the coffee. But the glass was fine.
   If it hadn’t been okay, I’d have collected the fragments in a metal dustpan, and gloved up heavily to pick fragments out of the carpet. That’s not being prepared. Being prepared means having a spare coffee glass downstairs, ready to replace a broken one.
   I have two downstairs, just in case I am clumsy as fuck.
   Lately, I’ve revised my revision of the revised revisited revision of the rearranged revamped routine. Tired bedding went to the dump. That’s the only place for it.
   I stare at an item that I should have a spare for. Then I order that spare. Why didn’t I have a spare for that?
   This almost worked for me. The original was on the way out. And the spare died on me when I brought it in as a replacement. Some items face heavy use, and they won’t last.
   So I arranged another spare. Slightly different. And that isn’t satisfactory. Now it is the only thing that works. So it needs a spare. But…a different one. Not the same brand. And so, it is arranged.
   What else? I found a few receipts when I had a clearout. That takes me back to the pre-Covid days when people actually spent cash-money in shops. The item in question still works. It has a load of bits and pieces, and they haven’t lasted as long as the main unit.
   To prolong the life of this ancient blender, I’ve bought in spares. Blades. Rubber gaskets. They are the first to suffer. But I never replaced the conveniently-sized blender cup. Now’s the time. The original unit is trudging on to eternity, and may outlive the planet.
   But that cup blended its last frothy milkshake, and its time was up. The replacement package was made up of two cups. So I now have a new cup and a spare, automatically. They all fit, and everything is fine.
   Routine is about having spares for every fucking thing here. I looked around the kitchen. If that blender dies, there is a spare blender unit. It’s almost the same. The spare didn’t come with the same conveniently-sized blender cups. Different model. All the cups fit both units, though. And so…to my quest for the right size of spare bits and pieces.
   If something fails and you are screwed, what can you do? Improvise. Order a new thing. Wait for the thing. I can’t do that, rapidly, with a fridge/freezer. That’s why the kitchen has two fridge/freezers. This one-customer care home flies on two engines. The food supply must be kept cool. It is milk. And I have milk to spare, too.
   Should a fridge die overnight in summer heat, the care home flies on.
   It’s time to review fire extinguishers. They are regularly checked, it’s true. So are the fire alarms and the carbon monoxide alarms. The alarms I check every week, on Monday. That’s how I know it’s Monday.
   Carer routine means days of the week mean less to you. At the weekend, there’s almost no chance of being phoned by a clinic. That’s about it. The carers who come in are, mostly, on a four-day cycle. They don’t recognise days of the week, either.
   For them, they live by day one, day four, and the blur in the middle. My blur is daily. Since becoming a dementia carer, I’ve lived through one day of care many times. It’s a one-day week. There are fixed points. Monday. Fire alarms. Tuesday. Shopping. Saturday, order shopping in advance. Other days slide in and out.
   Only occasionally, do days of the week matter. Never get ill on a Friday. Avoid mechanical failures on the weekend. What did Christmas in July mean for me? It meant checking the winter salt supply. We’re covered.
   I restocked on batteries again. And I’m piling up used batteries that go to the place. I’ll take those into town with items for charity shops. Ditch unused medicine at the pharmacy. Town is a one-stop shop for many activities dealt with at the same time. No fucking about.
   You develop very specific routines. I put my hand to the door. Why? At night, when the care team leaves, I tidy a few things. Double-check. If a carer comes back in, she’ll come back within half a minute.
   That mini-routine of checking things reduces any chances of a collision. Then I go to the door and I put my hand there while I lock up. Maybe the carer is late coming back for something. She might rattle the door open and shout that she’s forgotten A THING.
   With my hand to the door, I save my face from the door as I go to lock up. I’ve never been caught out by this. But I am aware it could happen. Carers knock on entering, but not on re-entering. Now they are in a hurry, and need the pen, the coat, the car keys, the glasses, the head they left behind that wasn’t screwed on, so they tell me.
   That is why I put my hand to the door. In case they barrel in. I do that, having noticed their routine. Knock on a visit. But just run back in when remembering an item. No one has come close to bashing my face in with a door.
   This is how you view the world. Through routines. Yours. Theirs. No one’s. What happens if you don’t have a routine for an event? Make one up, in advance. That’s the hand to the door.
   Anticipate. Dodge a bullet. Twice in the past week I was asked about obscure things. I had instant solutions for both. Somehow, I’d anticipated these odd events. The first one was a straightforward purchase of supplies, just in case.
   And the second was off-the-wall. But I had a gadget for other purposes that we could apply here, and I helped the carers. The carers were done, and returned looking for help. That was a daytime thing, though, so I wasn’t near the door.
   No need to lock up. There’s an alarm on the door that tells me people have come in. As I was in the main caring room, doing a tidy, I could see what was happening in front of me. Could I help out? Did I have a thing to help out? No, I had just the thing, the exact thing, and it did the job.
   What can’t I prepare for? A light aircraft, hitting the building. Even then, if I survived the impact, I’d go to the fire-drill. Hit the streets within a minute. Phone for help after evacuating. And then call the Social Work department to arrange emergency accommodation that could cope with various aspects of dementia care.
   That’s as far as I could plan. I think it’s as far as anyone could plan.
   So do I have any recommendations for you? Have more towels than you need. When a towel gets into a knife-fight with the washing machine, and comes out half-dead, you send that towel to Towel Heaven. And the whole operation doesn’t skip a beat.
   That’s it. Have more ready and waiting. More than you need. For you will need more. And you’ll need that extra item on the wrong day of the week at an awkward time of night. It’ll be right there, waiting for you.
   Being a carer means never having to reach for a household item that has just run out. If a toothpaste tube is fresh-opened, there’s a second waiting. I switched to metal dishes so I can never break a dish when I drop it. Or…it would be damned hard to break a metal dish. Let’s go with that.
   Also…metal dishes are fucking great. Why don’t I switch to metal cups? They aren’t so great. I have tools to fix things on both floors. Saves time hunting around for tools in a crisis. There’s no spare microwave. If that breaks, I have other cooking gadgets in abundance.
   I made space for two fridges. But there is only room for one microwave in the kitchen. I don’t believe in cooking gadgets outside the kitchen. That just feels wrong.
   You have spares for everything…except when you don’t. If I ever need a spare appendix, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, at night, when locking up, I put my hand to the door. Why? I don’t have a spare jaw.