I can barely cope, caring for a small, incontinent collie.
I’m writing this at 5am: Mini Puppy woke me up to tell me she was stuck down the side of her dog bed. Imagine if she were a great big man?
My friend, who is in her 80s, has an ex-partner of equal vintage who suffered a stroke a few years ago. After struggling with drop-in carers and my friend visiting each day to make dinner and collect laundry, he ended up in a care home. She visited often, only to find him sitting with a jug of juice but no glass. No teeth, beard untrimmed. He would be inadequately dressed for warmth, clutching a thin blanket, huddled in a ball trying to sleep. His dressing gown disappeared. The TV wasn’t working. And worst of all, he fell, often. The home’s policy is to leave a patient where they fall until a 111 paramedic arrives to move them: health and safety. Another fall, and this time he was taken to A&E, where they missed a serious graze on his arm. After he was discharged back to the home, my friend asked the staff for a first-aid kit and was told, ‘We’re not nurses.’ The cost? £82,000 a year.
So my friend decided to move him into her own house. I counselled against this, knowing from my own experience with my mum that caring for an older person, even if you’re young and fit, is a highly skilled job. It’s exhausting and stressful. But she insisted: ‘I’ve just bought a walking frame in the sale. Liz, I have to do this: he is my Mini Puppy.’
But very soon, the reality of caring for an older person took hold. He found the change of place and routine bewildering. He was yelling and screaming all night in his sleep. ‘Don’t let me fall. Help me, help me. I’m frightened.’ The worst aspect? She told me, ‘When changing him, he said, “Please don’t hit my head.” I don’t think they hurt him in the care home, but he can be very cantankerous.’
She would sit up with him all night, reassuring him. ‘However, having done some research, I discover that the night hours spent in care homes with room doors ajar, having to listen to the din made by other residents, carers moving around tending to incontinent cases and the constant ringing of bells for assistance exacerbates the progress of dementia,’ she said.
Finally, my friend asked for emergency help for four hours a day, only to receive an email telling her that no one would be available for two weeks at the earliest, and even then, they could only provide two hours’ assistance a day. She said, ‘I had a conversation today with a teenage social worker who spoke so rapidly, I had to ask her to repeat every sentence.’
He is now on a hospital ward while he waits for a vacancy at yet another care home: the few good ones are full to the brim.
On my friend’s suburban cul-de-sac, behind almost every ordinary front door, heroic struggles are taking place. A couple married for 51 years: he has terminal cancer and is on morphine, she is terrified of losing him. Another elderly couple: she’s in a wheelchair, he’s not coping. But my friend is of the generation that never complains: she just rolls up her sleeves and gets on with it.
Me: ‘Oh god, tell me you didn’t get the stair lift put in!’
‘Yes, I did, but it’s OK, and useful as I use it to send linens, etc upstairs. The birdies are hopping about, thinking of making a nest, and I am so looking forward to the first tulips!’
JONES MOANS… WHAT LIZ LOATHES THIS WEEK
- A man who sells brushes and cloths door-to-door, having just shown me a scan of his unborn foetus, hit on me! ‘You have amazing teeth!’ WTAF?
- I can’t open my Sky Glass remote control to change the batteries.
- The new Wuthering Heights is filmed in Swaledale, where I lost my house. The crew stayed in my old local pub, the cast at Simonstone Hall. My heart breaks at the beauty.
