{"id":613,"date":"2013-06-21T13:55:43","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T12:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.janelaverick.com\/?p=613"},"modified":"2013-06-21T13:56:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T12:56:13","slug":"care-ful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janelaverick.com\/?p=613","title":{"rendered":"Care-ful."},"content":{"rendered":"

The joys of being a carer at a distance reached a new low this week.  I was standing in a hospital car park, bleeding and in pain.  As I got in the car my husband said, \u2018The lady from the care agency has just rung.  Your mother has just fallen over in the garden and she wants to know what you are going to do about it.\u2019<\/font><\/p>\n

I thought, naturally, that what I would do was pop into the nearest phone box, pop my bloody underpants on the outside, don my cloak of really fast air travel, fly fifty miles, wave my magic wand and make everything better again, including me.<\/font><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember signing up for being a carer, only the agencies paid a wage get to do that.  I didn\u2019t sign up the first time either, when, about five minutes after I got married we discovered my mother-in-law had Alzheimer’s.  I looked after her every other long weekend for the five years left to her until she died, by which time I had cancer and was sixteen thousand pounds in debt.  On the other hand I am currently grateful for the speed immersion course in dementia which that experience was.  My father-in-law took the brunt of the caring, going for the alternate long weekends to his sister-in-law.  I had the opportunity to watch much of the pain, from outside, as I hardly had time to know my mother-in-law before she was ill.  Among other phenomena I was able to witness, was that, though any form of brain disintegration does affect the personality, to the extent that  <\/em>I believe you are<\/em> your brain chemistry, it is nevertheless true that nice people, however demented, are still basically nice people and that awkward buggers will be so forever.  I also am sure that while you cannot control what happens to you, you can control your response.  You can choose to be charming, or not, to a certain degree, even if well away with the pixies.  My mother-in-law was a lovely person, even when she was in a strange universe of her own making.<\/font><\/p>\n

In the five (I think, I\u2019ve stopped counting) times I\u2019ve turned up in hospital since last summer, everyone has been keen to tell me that you have to take care of your self, or else you can\u2019t take care of anyone else.  No one has outlined a scheme for not getting cancer, unfortunately, which is why, when the stomach pains I was putting down to stress or impending oesophageal cancer, turned out to be female in nature, I was at the doctors with as much celerity as the booking procedure allowed.<\/font><\/p>\n

When a doctor tells you they\u2019ll fast-track you, is that a good thing or a bad thing, do you think?<\/font><\/p>\n

Hmm.  So when I got the provisional hospital appointment by phone, I rearranged the timetable at the bank, even though I hadn\u2019t had the piece of paper from the hospital.  The appointment at my mother\u2019s bank was to put the Power of Attorney in place.  If you are in a caring role, you might want to research this.  Basically, in English law, with the aid of a solicitor, you can be registered to act as attorney with the Office of the Public Guardian for another person.  This means that you can sign papers on behalf of the person, arrange their financial affairs for them and so on.  You must always act according to their wishes and in their best interests.  It takes some twelve weeks currently, after application, to be registered, various interested parties have to be notified and so on.  When you have the official document this then has to be touted around all agencies where you may need to act, such as the bank, the tax office, the department of pensions and so on.  The process is lengthy; if you are considering it, start now.  My mother and I made enquiries just before Christmas, with her solicitor, who is quite efficient and I now have the document to hand, in the middle of June.  The good thing about it is that, once it is registered with the agencies concerned, you may never need it, but it\u2019s there if you do.  In that sense it is an insurance policy against things you hope may never happen, such as someone having a stroke and being unable to speak or write.  I think older couples would be well advised to have it for each other, especially if you have the kind of bank accounts, mortgages or investments where you both have to sign documents.<\/font><\/p>\n

In the case of my mother the difficulty has been with telephone arrangements.  On Saturday I rang the central call centre for the bank to make the appointment in the local branch.  As my mother was the account holder, they required her to identify herself using the telephone code they had given her when she had joined the branch, twenty years ago.  I explained the condition of vascular dementia and memory loss at some length, but they still wanted her to remember six random numbers issued to her twenty years ago.  They asked her to create a new code between six and ten numbers long but after the half an hour it had taken to get there, she was so confused she had to think quite hard to remember her date of birth.  They wanted her to key some memorable numbers on the phone herself.  I explained again that, to someone with vascular dementia, there is no such thing as a memorable number, but it had to be her finger poking the buttons.  I asked if I held her finger and poked the buttons if it would count.  The minion went and consulted a superior.  Yes!  That\u2019s acceptable, as long as it is her finger.  By that point her finger was up her nose, exploring, as she waved her head to and fro.<\/font><\/p>\n

Dear reader, my mother does not have any type of screen or monitor attached to her phone.  I will leave you to surmise whose finger prodded the buttons.  If this mortal sin is on my conscience, I think I will just have to live with it.<\/font><\/p>\n

Anyway, now a number had been keyed in, according to the wonderful rules, the telephone operator in the call centre was empowered to vouchsafe to us the information that he had no ability to make an appointment for us with the branch, which anyway, he thought had closed and he couldn\u2019t give us their direct number, which was a secret.  But, if we were lucky, someone from the branch might ring my mother on Monday to make arrangements with her.<\/font><\/p>\n

I forbore from suggesting that it would possibly be just as helpful to ring my mother\u2019s cat to make the arrangements, determining instead just to appear in the bank and demand to be seen.  So I rang my mother five times on Sunday day to tell her about the phone call and what she had to do, until the branch, sensibly, rang me at home on Monday.  It\u2019s always nice if there\u2019s a brain doing a bit of thinking somewhere, I feel.<\/font><\/p>\n

All of this, I would remind you, in case your neurons are on holiday too, is so that I can get my mother cared for and that bit out of the way before I turn up, festering, in hospital.<\/font><\/p>\n

So on Tuesday I did the bank, some shopping,, money to pay the cleaner, wound the clocks, sorted and dealt with the post, wrote letters, posted letters, planted plants, watered others, all neat and tidy and nothing outstanding before I went into hospital to be assaulted.<\/font><\/p>\n

If you are the proud possessor of a prostate or the underwriter of a uterus, you too may experience the jolly fun day when someone inserts a metal probe with a toothed. articulated end into an orifice in order to clamp the teeth round a portion of your person and rip it off with a twisting motion without so much as a \u2018do you mind?\u2019 or an anaesthetic.<\/font><\/p>\n

I yelled so loud you could hear the damned in the corridor stop their shuffling past to clamp their disintegrating bandaged mummy hands to their cauliflower ears.<\/font><\/p>\n

Thus it was twenty minutes later, hobbling gingerly into the car, bleeding like a stuck pig, I was asked to think of some miracle to solve everything in the ten minute car ride home.<\/font><\/p>\n

Amazingly, though my mother had fallen with a whack, backwards on her head, on to gravel, she had broken nothing and appeared to have no greater injury than a grazed elbow.  Thankfully she did it at the beginning of the care agency worker\u2019s hour-long visit.  But just to be sure I rang every couple of hours for the next two days, during which, incredibly, she has been quite calm verging on sensible and logical.<\/font><\/p>\n

Perhaps those of wandering wits should be prescribed the Manuel from Fawlty Towers treatment:  This \u2013 hand.  This \u2013 smack on head.  Or they can do it themselves:  This -  hard gravel slope \u2013 this \u2013 sudden assertion of gravity.<\/font><\/p>\n

Shortly I expect to receive the hospital appointment for the fun camera down the gullet thing, after which I, usually, cannot speak very well.  In anticipation of all that could occur, I should probably invent some form of telephone semaphore for those that have to answer the phone with brilliant off-the-cuff suggestions but can\u2019t actually talk.<\/font><\/p>\n

I just get so, I don\u2019t know, tired <\/em>sometimes.<\/font><\/p>\n

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<\/font><\/p>\n

This – JaneLaverick.com \u2013 this – Siberian hamster.<\/font><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The joys of being a carer at a distance reached a new low this week.  I was standing in a hospital car park, bleeding and in pain.  As I got in the car my husband said, \u2018The lady from the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[486,516],"class_list":["post-613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-parrot-has-landed","tag-being-a-carer","tag-lasting-power-of-attorney"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t