So now I am
officially in receipt of Carers’ Allowance, available if you are looking after
someone for 35 hours a week. You don’t have to be living in, just doing things
like admin, shopping, cooking etc etc. All these things I certainly do because
as I believe I may have already pointed out, caring seems to be bottomless and
whatever you do, there is always more.
For this I
get £62.70 a week and there is a limit on how much I can work / earn doing
another job, which is one of the reasons I resigned from mine.
I will
discuss the political implications of this pay capping another time, but while
grateful at the moment to be compensated in some small way for my role, I can
see that this is murky territory for carers.
Have I
joined an invisible underclass? A secret army of people who you’d never see
because they never stop working, often with a low-paid job on top of caring because somehow they have to make ends meet?
Who are permanently on the go, exhausted and desperately isolated but have no voice?
Will I become one of them? Not if I
can help it.
Meanwhile,
the NHS run Active Recovery service has now given way to Short Term Intervention
from the local authority. I’m crossing my fingers as I write this but they have
been marvellous - I can’t quite believe how much so.
They are
now coming in three times a day to administer morning and night-time medications,
help Nick get washed and dressed in the morning and undressed at night and make
sure that he has something to eat.
They clean
the table and slice cherry tomatoes and cucumber attractively on his plate to tempt him to
eat some veg. They have – without asking – emptied the bins, fed the cats and
taken washing out of the machine when the cycle finishes and hung it all up. To
me that is astonishing, because none of these things were in the care plan
which means they are thinking outside the box. Noticing what else might need to
be done, and just doing it. I feel so grateful.
Admittedly,
they are not so hot on recycling (must leave them a note) and whoever comes in
the morning cannot seem to open the curtains properly. But the important thing
is that Nick is safe, medicated, fed, and he has some social contact with people
he sees regularly and can get used to.
The bad
news is that although he had a bath seat fitted last week, he has only been able to use it once to have a
shower as his sudden backward spasming almost tipped him off, and even with two
carers helping, they thought it was unsafe. So it’s back to having a strip
wash. Poor Nick.
He is
sanguine about it in the way that someone is when they have entered the realm
of medical intervention. His body is not entirely his own affair any more, he’s
become used to being a patient. He’s a very patient patient at that, and I have
promised him that we will find a way to get him in the shower soon even if it
means going down to the circus in the park and demanding the phone number of an
obliging elephant!
But for the
moment, things are on an even keel and although I know it won’t last, it feels
like a relief just to be ordinary and have some of that pottering time I was
talking about and that blessed stillness.
