I do what I can to blog at the start of the month. This is not always possible. Usually, I hit the keyboard in the first week. Rarely, knowing I’ll be busier than a bee in high summer, I will write
up a blog post at the end of the month. Stick it in the freezer. Thaw it out when required, on the day.
Caring routine is about setting up routines that aren’t routines. Things move around. Just having a heating system go through its annual maintenance. Something relatively simple along those
lines. That can mess up so many routines. A letter comes in.
Please make the premises available. We will call on this day. That’s that. Immediately, I think of the day of the week connected to the maintenance visit. Different
days have wildly varied structures to them. Like this bread instead of that bread, or that cheese instead of this cheese, the days of the week have different characters to them.
Yes, the days all blur into the same day. Dementia care is that way for the carer and the cared-for alike. But you try to stamp something different on each day, to generate variety. I know Monday
is Monday based on the basic idea: if I’m testing the fire alarms, it must be Monday. You may see a flaw in this plan. But I’ve never tested the fire alarms on any other day by mistake. Just lucky, I guess.
Carers are in every single day. This adds to the sense that each day is a day of the week. What day is it today? It’s Strawberry. Routine. Testing fire alarms. Other routine. Carers visit. I
don’t test the alarms until the carers have been and gone in the morning.
If they arrive in the morning. Busy days push them nearer 12.00, and they may arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon. I go through the jumble of morning routine. Carers come and go. It is
Monday. I test the alarms. But when I test them is based on the carers and their ability to leave the building.
The carers just walk in. And I don’t want the carers to walk in while I am testing fire alarms, as they might think there is a fire. Testing the alarm upstairs sets off all the alarms in the
house. So I kick that confusion away. I wait for the carers on a Monday, before testing. Just in case they arrive super-early, well before they should turn up. No scope for confusion. If they hear an alarm when they walk in
on a Monday, that means there is a fire. They know I test the alarms on a Monday once they are gone.
This is the level of planning you develop over time as routines change. Once, there were no carers. I’d test the alarms on a Monday, giving a warning to the cared-for not to panic – this
is just a test. Incidentally, if you aren’t testing your fire alarms every week…test them every week.
And I don’t know what sort of Victorian house you are living in if you don’t have fire alarms and carbon monoxide alarms. But if that’s the case, buy alarms. Test the alarms. Maintain
the alarms. If they are battery-powered, keep spare batteries ready.
That annoying beep tells you the battery is low. Replace the battery. Don’t remove the battery and forget about it. Anyway. Regular routine isn’t even regular. On a Monday, one routine
depends on the routines of other people. How many extra visits did Headquarters throw at them?
You are told, when the service starts, the visit is an estimate. Carers get to you when they get to you. Before they reach you, they might have a catastrophic problem with the van. Or they are delayed
at a house, waiting for an ambulance. And so on. It’s an estimate. If they take more than an hour, you might get a phone call to say they are late. That’s if your regular team is on that day.
You don’t know who is available until they walk through the door. If they are replacements, and they are not familiar with the whole run of houses they must visit, then everything slows down
for them on every visit. They need to find out where the towels are. What pills to hand out. Where the special equipment is stored.
Special equipment in plain sight is always a Mystery Bag of Mischief. Every floor hoist and ceiling hoist and hoist sling is different. They operate differently. Devices recharge one way or another.
Place the hoist at the end of the rail to recharge. Or place the hoist anywhere but the end of the rail to recharge.
So. Monday. Fire alarms. I test them when the coast is clear. But clearing that coast is pure guesswork. That’s a fairly straightforward example of routine that moves around, during the day,
on one particular day of the week. There are many other things that happen spontaneously or they are arranged well in advance. Either way, you have to shift routine around.
And one part of routine, the part that can most easily go by the wayside, is blogging. The first two weeks of this month have been more random than usual. Summer weather kicked in. This meant the
sun shone in the sky, consistently, for a few days at a time. Then cloud closed in.
Hell, it even rained before things heated up again.
Weather is predictably unpredictable. There are hot weather routines and cold weather routines. And these must be ad-libbed. The fan goes on, to circulate air. This is full-blast if at night, aimed
in the general direction of the bed. And in the morning, too.
But for daytime into early evening, there’s a transfer to the chair. So I move the fan closer, place it on the floor, and reduce the blast. Too much of a good thing leads to chilling elderly
skin and a dehydration effect. Anyway, there’s more to do in the heat. So more is done, and that shifts routine around.
The carers bask in the fan. When they are in, the fan is up high out of the way of the chair that has to go back and forth when transferring from bed to chair or chair to bed. And that fan’s
up high so we don’t use the chair to demolish the fan. Up high, out of the way, providing general support, the fan is perfectly placed for the carers. No complaints from them.
Along with the fan routine, there’s the supply situation. The supermarket decided, two weeks in a row, to stack all the deliveries early. I had super-early text messages directing me to super-early
e-mails telling me what wasn’t available at the supermarket as the supermarket opened. Funny, that. When they don’t do this super-early, nearer actual delivery time, I receive the products I ordered in.
Early notification. They didn’t have the essential lifeline: strawberry milk. Instead of going with their own brand of strawberry milk, they sent chocolate milk. And that’s no good. It
had to go back. Yes, I have spares to see me through a crisis like that.
But…sending the chocolate milk back, there’s still going to be a gap in the supply. I can’t take the risk. What if they do this to me two weeks in a row? Survivable. But you don’t
want to face this three weeks in a row. So this glitch sends me back to the internet to order in an extra delivery the next day. And I have to wait around the next day, for that delivery. Sure enough, strawberry milk is back
in stock.
What’s my point? An extra delivery, above and beyond normal, eats into blogging time. Dishing out extra drinks of milk in rising temperatures…is essential. And eats into blogging time.
Fill a cup with a cold drink from the fridge, and time yourself drinking it as fast as you can.
Now imagine drinking that over the course of twenty minutes. That’s how long it can take, when the person drinking has no concentration. Yes, the cup has a lid on it. Spills are annoying, and
cleaning a spill would eat into blogging time. Does this matter? No. Blogging can always wait.
I’m not here to list all the things that shoved this blog a fortnight deeper into the month than usual. But I did wrestle a machine into a fight with a tree. And the top of the tree lost that
fight. This ate into the branches and the leaves. And into blogging time.
If I write one of these blogs, I try my damnedest to write in one solid chunk. If I can’t do that, the blog falls by the wayside that day. Right now, I wrote about half of this material. Then
I stopped to make a bed before the arrival of a supermarket delivery.
Now I am finishing this blog just minutes before I’m in the delivery zone. Soon, I’ll find the time to have a meal. This blog is about all the things that add up to kill off your writing
time. Even writing in one solid chunk wasn’t possible today. Two chunks, stitched together, sealed the deal. Better late than never.
Writing the blog is not a priority. I look after someone who has no concentration. That is the priority. I see by the power of the software that I’ve written enough for now. Now, I must go and
see to other things. Then I’ll return at some point, and publish this. But I’m too busy to hit that button, just yet.
Hours and meals later. Many things took up my time. This ate into blog publication time. I still have to process this text. You used to be able to drop the words into the blog and that was that. Now the blog generates spaces between paragraphs. It is annoying. And eats into my time, as I “correct” something I didn’t do. Everything feels delayed. There’s a tumble dryer rumbling away, long after it should be. That’s an afternoon thing, not an early evening thing. Every piece of routine is moveable. But things must be done, eventually. There. I’ve blogged.
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