DEMENTIA CARE: THE RANDOMNESS OF CARING.

Every routine has its own self-destruct button. You apply a level of routine to the randomness of dementia care. That application is a coat of varnish specially designed to evaporate on contact with the world.
   You dive back into randomness when you are forced to hit the self-destruct button. You were doing something, and it was computerised. Very important. But now, at an odd time, the bell chimes to let you know someone walked in through the door.
   There are no odd times for the care team to walk in. Unless one of them got up at 3.00 in the morning, sleepwalked to your house, and triggered the alarm. This has yet to happen.
   Nurse visits are almost always by appointment. The appointment occurs from 9.00 in the morning until 5.00 in the afternoon. Recently, there was an unannounced nursing visit, to take blood samples, at 9.00 in the morning.
   At least I didn’t have to wait in all day for it. This vampire only worked in the mornings. So it was a 9.00 through to 12.00 visit. That’s how the vampires get you. They tell you they work mornings so you believe they are alive.
   “We humans like to get up early in the morning.”
   Always treat that sort of talk with suspicion. This is how the aliens infiltrate. They pretend to be vampires pretending to be humans. No one suspects the real conspiracy hidden inside the other real conspiracy.
   My morning routine involves a bit of start-up caring followed immediately by a coffee. This coffee happens between 8.30 and 9.00 when almost no one can interrupt me. Occasionally, maintenance work will happen from 8.00 onward. But I get word of that, well in advance.
   There I was, coffee over, arranging computer-based caring, when the bell tolled and told me an intruder had just entered the property. The care team rarely reaches me at 9.30. Couldn’t reach me any earlier, without a special request going through.
   Those special requests were in the pre-Covid days. Be ready for Patient Transport to a hospital. Or have everything out of the way for the Daycare mini-bus. Those routines faded. Who would walk in at 9.00 in the morning?
   The blood sampler. This cheery chatty vampire never phones ahead. On a different system. Or marches to the beat of a different drum. Most likely a tuba. Comes from another planet. Fills in for the regulars.
   We engaged in slow arm-wrestling with the cared-for, and failed to get any blood out. I moved around to the other side of the bed and engaged in even more arm-wrestling, while the vampire attacked the problem from a new angle.
   Blood flowed freely. We marched in a roundabout way to the bin, the one that didn’t contain recyclable items, and our parade signalled the end of the matter. Either there’d be results in a week, or the results wouldn’t show any change and there’d be no need to send results.
   Somewhere along the way I received text messages telling me all the doctors are off sick and could I please not be ill today. This day, specifically. Fuck this day, in particular. Luckily, I am not ill. I don’t know how ill the doctors are.
   A lot of physicians, healing themselves that day, I guess. Other unexpected notes arrive, with deliveries of pills. A receipt is attached to the bag. The pharmacy has run out of milkshakes. Again. They owe us milkshakes. And they’ve owed us milkshakes for two months, now.
   I bought a batch of spares off Amazon. Sometimes, when supply issues hit…the company making the milkshakes gets replaced. And suddenly you have all the milkshakes again. Just in a slight variation of the standard flavouring. My problem is wondering how long to wait for non-existent milkshakes.
   Do I wait? Two weeks, and the pharmacy catches up and makes a delivery. Maybe the pharmacy never catches up. So it’s a month without. We made it through without milkshakes for a month. Other milk products are in the bag, and they provide sustenance. The extra calories are available.
   But as soon as a second note came, attached to a new bag of pills, that was it. Time to abandon routine, hit the self-destruct, and buy the identical milkshakes from Amazon. They weren’t short of milkshakes.
   Once in eternity Amazon will cancel an order. The third-party vendor ran away with the fiver and is now on the run for the rest of his life. Amazon carries the can for that. Your money is refunded. Then you are forced to make alternative arrangements.
   Never mind all that. Amazon had identical milkshakes and milkshakes arrived. Soon enough, it’ll be time to order another receipt for missing milkshakes. I mean…soon enough it’ll be time to order more milkshakes from the pharmacy.
   I hope if they don’t have them that they don’t have them in strawberry. See if they don’t have them in chocolate, we’ll all be sorely disappointed.
   I am still waiting for the repair to happen to that door. This involves removing the entire door. Bits are falling off the underside, and I don’t see the winter weather doing it any favours. As long as I keep it maintained, using the temporary fix of detergent, I’ll be okay.
   Not that I distrust the door. I’m sure that one slug made it to the kitchen counter by other means. Used the key, like a normal slug would. Didn’t come through the disintegrating underside of the door. Jangled the keys then avoided the pressure plate for the bell.
   Wildlife randomly alters your routine, pressing the self-destruct on your behalf. It’s been a long time since I had to escort a wasp from the premises, with the warning not to come back or its kneecaps would never play the piano again. No wasp action, this time.
   The tap-tap-tapping of a tiny moth, playing a drum routine on a light, loud enough to rival John Bonham at his most feverish, plays havoc with whatever the fuck you were doing at the time. The cure is the Spider Glass. Yes, I catch spiders in that, and send them to the garden.
   I’ve also caught moths in it. And the other day, I trapped a particularly angry buzzy fly. Slugs go out on a scrap of cardboard. No glass for them. I haven’t had a mass of ants in here since I cordoned the kitchen with vinegar on the floor. Ants learned to look elsewhere for snacks.
   For weeks I knew there was a tiny spider in here somewhere. One of those almost non-existent fuckers. They leave a motorway made of webbing behind them, trailing back three hundred miles. You always work from the middle of the web to the wrong end…the start. You find nothing.
   Well, I was looking for something else entirely and found the wee bastard taking a break from it all. Hiding down low, clinging to the underside of a shelf. The wee fucker moved fast when I sprang the trap, but I moved faster.
   All the beasties went back to the garden and I returned to shattered routines. Discovering a loose cable over where the carers went back and forth, I rescued the hammer from a life of tedium and went to work adding more fixings to the wall. Once I found the box full of those fixings, of course. That was a detour within a side-mission.
   Animal rescue. Household maintenance. The unannounced arrival of a vampire. And the announced lack of arrival of those milkshakes. These things wrecked routines. Luckily, I had routines in place to fix broken moments.
   And I consumed a great deal of coffee. So much coffee that I’ve laid on an extra coffee supply run just for that and some more toilet roll. At least it is all lightweight. August evaporated. The weather finally turned.
   Night suddenly falls hours earlier, doing away with all those fake night skies at midnight. There are hints of the chill to come on the odd wind gust. I have salt supplies in for frost. And I’ll have cans of stew in the kitchen before long.
   Goodbye August. Farewell meteorological summer.
   Here’s September, instantly, after a year that blinked itself away just to reach this point. True, September can turn on the heat. We’ll see. But it is a month known for its charm, and its charm lies in cooling.
   I’m pretty much done trimming the tree for the year. A last burst of leafery before slowing down. The tree, not me. This blog post wasn’t about anything, except arranging a blog post on the first of the month. Mission accomplished.
   Interrupted by text messages. The coffee supply run is on. It is happening. Confirmed. Also confirmed, for mid-October, the new door. At any old time, on the day, from 8.00 in the morning at the earliest. At least it’ll be done before December. And I’ll have coffee laid on for the occasion.
   I walked into the garden to bring the bin in. Gentle autumn rain fell from welcoming grey skies. The searing blue of summer is done.