The embuggerance factor.

Whilst the patient is unwittingly (and, sometimes, wittingly) wonderfully annoying and the to and the the fro is draining and knackering to the car, for real solid gold irritation you cannot beat the embuggerance factor.

We popped down on Saturday unannounced and had planned to make that our popping until Thursday (bearing in mind that the round pop is about ninety miles).  So I stayed up late last night clearing away all the card making stuff with which I have been gluing my sanity together.  I had plans today, on a clean table, to get started on some proper art with a calm mind ( which is the right attitude if you want a good outcome), after a hefty workout.  All the snatched takeaways are settling round my hips like a lifebelt; if I went down at present, comparisons with the Titanic would not be fathoms off the truth.

After feeding the cats, unlocking the front door, and letting in the sunshine, I took a good look at the table, which, cleared, proves to be a flat wooden surface with a heavily etched top and three empty chairs under it and three piled with rubbish.  Perfect for an artist.  With a productive day of my favourite kind in prospect, I headed for the bathroom.

Then the phone rang. My mother’s microwave had packed up.  It’s ancient, a very state of the art, top of the range oven, cooking by magical, invisible microwave radiation, which is at least as old as my son.  The carers cleaned the turntable, which proved, to the amazement of all, to be cream in colour, not brown matching the casing, as we thought.  However, even clean, it’s not working; it might even have been the layer of filth holding it all together that kept it going.

So off we go, after a trip to the local electrical retailers to find an equivalent replacement for my mother to hate and not understand, and take it down to her.  So bang goes the day, as usual.

I have been in contact with a far flung member of my husband’s family, a cousin, whose mother is in care.  The patient is wonderfully demented, exactly as my mother was in hospital.  The daughter is having a nervous breakdown and, when she visits her mother, takes a friend to ease the strain.  The S&H is going to visit his aunt this week, prepared for distress by visits to his grandmother.  He had a wonderful relationship with his aunt, a lovely person, plunged into dementia when the anaesthetic in a routine operation went wrong.

Once again I contemplate the difference between care at home and care in a residential home.  There is no doubt that for the patient, confident and secure in their accustomed space, home care is the best option.  My mother appears lucid much of the time and has one on one care specifically tailored to her.  I think it’s even better than the care I could give if I lived there, by now I would be tired, ill or dead and definitely short of patience.  The carers, on seven hour shifts, are always fresh and empathetic.

The downside is of course, that without training I’m running a care home.  I have all the responsibility remotely that goes with the job but no pay and no time off.  While I was writing this the phone rang.  It was the carer to say the microwave was working again, but, having spent the last two hours diverting my day to a trip down to my mother’s I think we will buy and take a new microwave oven anyway.  I just know if I didn’t there would be another phone call later and we’d have to go at a less convenient time than at the start of the day.

I suppose you could get training for looking after the demented, I imagine you could go on courses for nursing the elderly or interacting with staff you’ve hired but there is no education for dealing with the embuggerance factor.

You just have to rely on your experience of life in general and annoyance in particular.

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JaneLaverick.com – close friend of Murphy.

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