It’s giving me the pip

That’s rather an old fashioned expression now isn’t it? It means, to irritate exasperate or annoy.* 

*Look at this wonderful link, which, if it’s new to you, will explain all.

Oh, those people at the DWP knew what they were doing. I bet there were public school boys involved who’d read their PG Wodehouse and were having a little private snigger at the connotations, the nuances of which us plebs wouldn’t ever understand.

Well, I have thoroughly got the pip.

There’s another big stack of its paperwork lying on my desk and it seems so unfair.

We had finally got the letter about transferring Nick’s DLA to PiP and I duly filled in the Work Capability Assessment form, being very clear about the extent of his impairment. Also, names and contact details of all the various professionals involved in his care, and 30 pages of supporting evidence including his CHC assessment done at New Year. My printer had broken so I went to the library to make the copies, and write Nick’s National Insurance number on each side of every page. Just doing that bit and checking it all took over half an hour. Then I went to the Post Office and posted it off.

Job done, I thought.

On Thursday (admittedly a quick turn around) I got a new application form for PiP, this time addressed to me. I couldn’t understand why. It was obviously a different form and generated from the previous one, but why? What part of “diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease in 2010, progressive condition, cannot dress, wash or feed himself, acute dysphasia and cognitive impairment” had not been not quite clear?

The questions were almost identical to the previous form, asking the same things about what can you / can’t you do for yourself.  I felt very anxious about this and why they were asking the same things again, as if to try to catch us out – as if Nick were just pretending to have Huntington’s Disease, you know, just for a laugh and to con a few quid out of the public purse.

The first time Nick applied for DLA, ten years ago when his symptoms were too visible to ignore, when he had been sacked from his job because he kept dropping things and he had been told he was no longer fit to drive, he was turned down.

His Huntington’s advisor in the north east appealed and this time won by a couple of points.

Not because he had been diagnosed with a life limiting progressive illness and was suffering from panic attacks, acute disorientation and stress incontinence, but because he was deaf in one ear and had to wear a hearing aid. Give me strength! He got his DLA, though. And a Blue Badge. 

Back at my desk, May 2019, I kept circling this new lot of paperwork. Eventually the penny dropped that this is Part 2 of the application, the Daily Activities Assessment to establish the extent of Nick’s support needs. It never occurred to me to look this up online, I had just thought that you made the application and then someone would get back to us with a yay or nay. Goodness, how naïve.

The damn thing is sitting on my desk and I will just have to woman up and fill it in. 

Safina, the advice worker at our local Carers’ Centre, gave me a crib sheet of the points system (“Cannot stand and walk unaided more than 20 metres – 12 points”) and it is immediately apparent that Nick will score highly on all counts.

What grieves me though, apart from the exasperation and annoyance of having to spend another chunk of my time going through all this again and gathering the bloody supporting information all over again (yes, they want that too) is that it’s always time I could be spending with Nick, being with him rather than closeted up somewhere I can concentrate doing this for him. He’s oblivious of course, I’ve told him that his benefits are changing and I’m having to apply for the new version of DLA but he doesn’t really retain the information or understand. 

Just have to suck it up and fill the form.  One of my most hated tasks. I’m a right- brain intuitive with "unusual" handwriting. Some people have the neat and orderly form-filling gene, but me, no. It’s a painful chore. And that’s me with two degrees! How must it be for someone not confident with their literacy, struggling with an impairment, trying to do it for themselves?

And then underlying all that is the actual content of the questions. Every single part of it only highlights exactly what Nick cannot do and will never do again. Leave the house unaided. Walk 50 yards. Prepare a simple meal. Make a budgeting decision. I know all these things because I see them every day but seeing it in such quantitative cold hard print makes it very real and only adds to the cruelty of this horrible illness. But there we are. All I can hope for is that he gets the award without too many further hoops to jump, and that someone who reads it breaks out of their Bot mould for a few minutes and learns a little bit about what it really means to be living with Huntington’s.

My Aim is True

It felt especially hard to leave Nick this time. I’ve been up to London to look at the Queen (no, not really) for three whole days and nights and saying goodbye to him on Sunday was a wrench. I was sure he’d be OK – he has the carers, for all their lackadaisicalness, and Simon was going to look in – but the rest of the time he would be on his own and increasingly I fear for his safety.

Also – it’s a long day, as he once told me so poignantly when we talked about his drinking. When your world has shrunk so small and you can do so little for yourself, what else are you going to do to help the hours pass?

We’ve been over this so many times. He can’t live with us because we haven’t got the space or anything like the possibility of adaptations; we’ve got too many stairs and steps in this crazy ramshackle Bohemian house. He wanted to be independent, anyway. But that was before the illness got so much worse, and now independence is more of a vague concept than a practical reality.  At least he’s in a place he calls his own, with no one else changing the channel on the TV or telling him what time to go to bed.

And I need my own life. Juggling like this practically kills me sometimes and I forget how much effort it takes just to run both of our lives, after a fashion. If I don’t get away now and then – to walk, to swim, a little trip to see friends or just be at home with my family, then my batteries get too run down to be 100% there for Nick.

But it’s hard to leave him. I just don’t like leaving him on his own, so vulnerable.

Just walking to the loo and back is getting so much harder for him, his odd unrhythmic shuffling gait so much more jerky and unsteady. He comes back with a damp patch all down one leg and I know there’ll be a puddle on the floor. Unlike the song, his aim is not at all true. Really need to call the continence people again to ask for advice – I’ve been told that they can supply a kind of padded jockey short and I did flag this up a couple of months ago but no-one has been back to us yet. It’s on the to-do list for today. Likewise calling our old friends the council repairs team about the bathroom radiator. Nick leans on it for support whenever he staggers to the loo, so It’s coming off the wall again.

How to put all this in the PiP application form, which asks for as much information from as many providers as possible? As usual, I’ll also send a bunch of HDA information leaflets explaining the complexities and horrors of the illness. So many of these that it won’t all fit in one leaflet and there are several ones covering just some of the symptoms and issues involved. But even these don’t address the ongoing day-to-day crises and concerns.

Nick doesn’t really understand what’s happening when I’m sitting at his table, cursing under my breath as I fill out forms like this or wrestle with his online banking. His DLA payment is still coming in but has suddenly moved to a week later than it had always been, so he is out of pocket and I’ll have to take some money out of his savings to cover this week’s standing orders. 

I tell him it’s fine to listen to the radio or look at the paper as usual but since I’m here he wants to have his chair moved so he can see me, even if he can’t quite process what I’m doing, and he sits uncomfortably, getting twitchier as he knows something is happening that he can’t quite grasp.  

I explain again about the PiP but his short term memory can’t hold on to the what’s and why’s, and I have to play down any mention of anything changing as that makes him too anxious. He twitches and keeps eyeing me nervously as I sit with the laptop at his padded table. It’s not exactly quality time in its ideal sense.

However, at least when I’m doing all these tiresome tasks we are at least in the room together and he knows I’m here for love. Apart from filing this wretched form in and surreptitiously googling incontinence shorts, I’m not sure what else I can offer.

A Small Triumph

It has taken 22 months, six weeks’ worth (at a conservative estimate) of my dedicated admin time, not counting actual meetings or phone calls, possibly two hundred outgoing phone calls, approximately ten hours of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons while I wait on hold, several trees’ worth of paperwork, two sets of original documents lost in the post, three shades greyer of hair, continual and soul gnawing financial juggling every single week, one sense of humour missing presumed dead, and a whole new understanding of the term “Kafka-esque.”

But at long, long last, Nick has had his ESA benefits reinstated. Six brown envelopes arrived in the post yesterday explaining different aspects of the decision. I couldn’t understand any of it and had to ring up again today, and even the DWP advisor admitted that the wording was unclear.

I’d had a number of telephone conversations with a different advisor earlier this week, who told me that he had literally spent two entire days trying to unravel the wild goose trail of Nick’s state benefit provision - suspended, reinstated then suspended again for no apparent reason, since he had left County Durham to live in Sheffield.

He had the kind of croaky Lancashire accent that made him sound more like a favourite DJ for 6 Music than a civil servant so I was inclined to trust him. And Nick has since had a nice arrears payment into his account (even though there is no mention of this in the six letters from the DWP, or the seventh one that came today saying that he needed to send XYZ information by tomorrow, or else) so I was slightly concerned that it might be a blip and would suddenly disappear again. But after the follow up conversation with the girl on the phone today, it does seem to be a genuine rebate of sums owed and the new weekly payment has gone in too. At last. At long blinking last.

Just one thing - Mr 6 Music suggested that if I were to give up claiming Carers' Allowance, Nick would get more money because he would then be eligible for a Severe Disability premium. He can't get this while I am getting the Carers' Allowance. If I stopped, we would both be better off. Can that be right? And if so, how have I not understood this before and why has no-one ever told me? 

I have never been happy about the limitations of Carers' Allowance, which seem incredibly unfair and a deliberate poverty trap for people who are working their butts off and saving the state so many billions. I could stop tomorrow - but I have structured my current working pattern around the limited amount of hours I can work alongside the small weekly allowance, and I'm nervous. 

Can I honestly expect to return to better paid work at my age, having lost so much confidence and lost sight of my previous skills? 

If I were doing project management in the real world on the scale I've been doing for Nick, I'd be earning a six figure salary and I would have status. And staff! But it doesn't translate quite like that into the real world, does it? 

And let's face it, it's not as if I'm going to suddenly stop being a carer. I'll still be spending the same amount of time tending to bro, so would there even be time for more work? 

I need some advice. 

Nevertheless, I have a glimpse of something different, a brightness on the horizon, just being aware that perhaps another way has opened up that wasn't visible before.  

In the meantime, I am going to put all the  fluorescent post-it-note-festooned paperwork from the last 22 months into a file and throw it in the cupboard. Then Nick and I are going out for a slap-up lunch. 

Biting the hand that feeds, Baby.

I really, really, really need new glasses. If you are as short sighted as me, these don't come cheap, and this has brought on feelings of panic and mutiny, because as a carer, I seem to fall between the cracks for help with the costs.

So let us get this straight.

I am on Carers’ Allowance, which is nearly £10 a week less than JSA, Universal Credit or whatever is currently being rolled out, as they say, in your area. Yet JSA would qualify me for free or heavily discounted optical and dental treatment, and Carers' Allowance does not.

To qualify for Carers’ Allowance in the first place you need to be actively caring for someone for 35 hours or more a week, which considerably more time than someone on JSA is expected to spend looking for work.

True, no sanctions or interviews or mandatory job experience at Poundland for me, or having to prove what I have done every minute of the day to seek gainful employment; although try asking most carers to account for each hour they have spent and everything they have done in a typical week of caring and if they had to log all that to qualify for their weekly payment you would probably break the internet. The whole system would explode! And who at the DWP would have time to read it?

  

In order to be eligible for Carers’ Allowance in the first place, my income had to be under the limit of £116 a week (now £120) for the two months before applying. 

It was a relief in a way to drop some hours as the combination of the four-day week I’d been doing with the sudden addition of 35 hours (at a low estimate) of unexpected brother care, was a killer. 

I was waking up panicking and fighting for breath from the sheer shock of it all. I had become a bona fide carer almost overnight, but could not be officially recognised as such until I stopped earning money.

It felt like a real catch 22 to have to agree to be poorer in order to continue doing a new job that I’d not applied for or expected to be doing with such a high level of responsibility, with no training, and essentially unpaid apart from this small stipend.

But I was glad to have it too, even while the catch 22 was staring me in the face.  If I was going to be doing 35 + hours a week looking after Nick, I might as well get some kind of acknowledgment and regular payment for it, even if I then couldn’t continue to do my job the way I had been or get paid a decent wage.

The absolute maximum you can earn as a carer doing 35+ hours of support, plus working part-time, is £185 a week. Bear in mind that the average weekly wage is £520. According to Paul Lewis the financial broadcaster, when you take into account all the hours worked by the average carer, this is not even approaching minimum wage, with no legal access to earning more.

I understand why you’d need to put a limit on hours worked in addition to your caring role but why the earnings cap? Why can’t you work for sixteen hours at a good rate? 
Unless you’re very lucky with your employer, doing such a relatively small number of hours tends to mean working at minimum wage and even zero contracts.

Why force carers, who are saving the government and NHS approximately £60 billion a year, into badly paid work? It seems particularly cruel.

Why can’t we work smarter for a limited number of hours at a good job that would help support us, the person we care for and our families, and help us from being a burden on the state?

A limit of hours worked AND on earnings is fundamentally a poverty cap and suggests that where this legislation is involved, carers are held in contempt.

  

I was never a high earner apart from (ironically) a short stint doing research at the DWP, and I’m used to living in a fairly low-impact, resourceful style, and have always felt abundant in other ways. 
But these days as a carer I realise I’m earning below the official poverty level and I bet I’m not alone.  

According to a recent interview with Caroline Dinenage, Minister of State for Health and Social Care, there is "no more financial help available" for carers. The government pot is too stretched. 
OK. But why, if carers are condemned to a low income not commensurate with the amount of work they do, are we not at least given help with the costs of dental treatment and glasses? 
Seriously, baby. I can’t be the only carer who is short sighted with astigmatism and English teeth. 

I am allowed a free eye test, yippee, but I could equally have one of those if I pick up the right coupon from the supermarket. And yes, I know there is a low income voucher scheme if you apply to the NHS through form HSC1, but it still feels insulting to make carers jump through yet another sodding hoop to fill in yet another form and justify their existence.  

I mean real help towards the things that actually matter – eyesight, teeth – that can cost a chunk of your money if you are not deemed exempted. Carers need to keep well, and most of us need to drive, (and to be able to see to fill in those endless sodding forms) and eyes and teeth need maintenance especially for the high percentage of older carers. 

Why can’t that be acknowledged with some practical support?

And as for a massage or some physio for my permanently aching back from lugging a wheelchair in and out of the car and a thousand other little daily tribulations, tell me that other carers don’t long for these and I won’t believe you. 
We need to stand up for our rights.

Voice of the Donkey

Not had time or head space to write for a while – things keep happening and being able to sit down to record my thoughts at any kind of leisure has been too much of a luxury.

But that’s why I started writing a blog in the first place, because things keep happening and I needed to keep track. So here we are, midnight, way past my bedtime on a day when I could happily have gone back to bed first thing this morning and slept for a week.

Earlier this week I was interviewed for Radio 4’s Money Box Live programme about the financial impact of being a carer. 

They asked what I did for Nick and I trotted out a list off the top of my head, thinking to myself that it sounded like nothing and feeling the usual guilt that I should be doing more and am not there for him 24/7.

People often ask if he lives with us and I still feel bad that he doesn’t – even though our house is just not big enough for the both of us, and when he did stay with us on first arriving in Sheffield last year, he fell down our stairs and broke his collarbone within two days. 

So no, he doesn’t live with us, but we see him every day and I probably spend at least three or four hours a day dealing with his paperwork, money, shopping, appointments, blah blah blah. But some people spend their entire life doing that for the person they care for; I know an eighty year old who has perhaps two hours off each day if she's lucky, and many live-in carers report a 90 hour week. 

What I do for Nick in comparison feels like nothing much - and it feels like an endless mountain. 

It's hard to explain how the time just sucks into a vortex when you're looking after someone else like this. 

And I simply could not have expected the level of responsibility and care I would be taking on. 

No-one does, I’m sure. It soon starts to feel normal though, so you take on more, until suddenly you are like one of those poor Greek donkeys staggering under an impossible weight. I used to cry when I saw them and try to get their owners to relieve the load. Of course they would just laugh and pile on another brick. “The donkey doesn’t feel it!” 
Now that donkey is me.

On the radio interview there was only time to include a small part of my duties, just the tip of the iceberg really, and of course so much of what you’ll do as a carer is often unquantifiable. But viewed from the outside, I saw that other people really did think it was a lot. 

Well, it's all relative (literally so)

But it has made me think. It has made me more proud of myself, and more determined to do a good job for Nick. 

But it has made me more angry, and more determined to speak out about carers' rights, keep lobbying for more recognition (and god knows, more financial support) and keep connecting with other people whether they are carers themselves or not. It can be a lonely old business and we need to talk to each other. I might feel like it a lot of the time but I refuse to be an Eeyore. Us donkeys need to stick together - go on with our work but make sure we raise our collective voice, echoing across the hillsides. Let me hear you, brothers and sisters!

The Donkey - GK Chesterton

Burn after reading

“The Cat has left the Building” 

It sounds like a code message between Cold War spies, but I was finally able to text this to Nick’s landlord last night after Simon managed to bundle the poor creature into her basket and whisk her off to be reunited with Nick in their new home.

It took the best part of three days to catch her, and only then because the landlord was anxious to start stripping out the leaking bathroom before the cellar below got completely flooded. It has been like this for weeks but the landlord kindly said he would wait until Nick moved out to start bottoming the whole thing. He has been saintly, considering that this is the third time he’s had to remove the bathroom fixtures to repair broken pipes, and the floor is completely sodden. The poor cat was hiding in the furthest possible corner beneath the bath, crouching on the sodden joists and too frightened to come to our encouraging coos and chicken legs, followed by the terror of men in big boots starting work in there, so it must have been a relief to be captured at last. 

And the expression on my brother’s face to see her safely back, and the purring she made on arrival at last, made the whole thing worthwhile. So all three of them are together in their new home and seem happy to be there.

Behind the scenes it’s a slightly different matter. I remember what a shock I got the first time round when Nick moved here in May, when all the arrangements I had so carefully been setting up for weeks just dropped into a vortex where papers had been lost, information not passed on and all support simply stopped.

I don’t think it’s quite as bad as that now, but there’s an echo.

So this week I have become the Butt-Kicking Battleaxe as one thing after another goes not according to plan.

Housing benefit application lost in translation, can I provide the documentation again. I will need to bring I.D and all the original documents into the council offices for approval. We'd been told a month ago that it was all being processed, but apparently someone had made a mistake and this is not the case.

The key-safe I requested two weeks ago. Written application handed directly to the new housing officer for Nick's area, “mislaid”. Whoops. Thankfully the social worker has pulled out a few stops and organised a temporary one so that the carers don’t have to wake Nick up and get him stumbling to the door to let them in for his morning call. 

The new carers from Care4S (another pseudonym, natch) have yet to prove themselves but don’t impress so far by twice not turning up til 11am to help Nick dress and administer his morning meds, then returning just an hour later to do his lunchtime call. 

One of them has such a phobia of cats that she hardly dares walk through the door in case she sees one of them (and there was only one of them until last night!) and won’t go in the bedroom because what if a cat leaps out from under the bed. She’s supposed to be helping him dress, wash and undress every day this week. In his bedroom. I feel sorry for her but my brother’s needs have to come first. 

It’s clearly not going to work out so I ring the company to voice my concerns.

“He could put the cats in another room when carers arrive” is their advice. No. I don’t think so.

He is severely impaired and cannot do anything of the kind, hence needing care in the first place. And besides, it’s a one bedroom flat! 

It is inappropriate for this carer to be coming here in these circumstances and I will leave it to you to make a different arrangement, I say, repeating myself slowly and firmly in the old broken record stylee.

Broken record doesn’t work with the TV installation company who fail to turn up for the third day running. Aside from wasting hours waiting for them, only to be told at the eleventh hour that they can’t make it today, Nick is terribly disappointed. Like so many housebound people, he relies on the TV as a companion and friend and was really looking forward to one of his special programmes tonight. I am incensed on his behalf and ring the call centre to complain. I had already negotiated a discount to make up for their first two no-shows, by now I think they owe me compensation for lost time as well as an apology. Fat chance. The call centre girl couldn’t care less. I ask to speak to a supervisor. Sorry, the supervisors have left for the night. Well of course they have! I let off steam with a blistering online review of their rubbish service but it doesn’t get Nick’s telly fixed.

Meanwhile a friend texts to tell me about her father who was admitted to hospital after a fall and was later discharged without his clothes, specs, personal papers and very expensive specialist hearing aids. Unfortunately they had all been mislaid. The hospital will look into it but can’t accept responsibility for lost property, it is up to the patient to look after their belongings. She is hopping mad as well as grieving for his helplessness and frailty and I completely understand.

It is immensely tiring as well as tiresome to be fighting all the time to put things right for a loved one who can’t do it for themselves, especially when someone was actually employed and entrusted to organise it properly in the first place.

It makes me so cross that when the TV aerial company or a council officer fail to do their job they can just walk away for the night and still get paid, while family carers have to pick up the pieces in their own time, which is already taken up with so many other duties of care and often when they’re already exhausted. Not paid to do it, doing it for love. In time that is so stretched that it would make your average public servant look like Richard Branson lounging in his Caribbean hideaway in comparison.

And it's the unfairness of it all that gets me in the gut, that someone like Nick who already has so many odds stacked against them should be at the mercy of sheer carelessness and - well, that's just it isn't it - lack of care. I care, and they say that love can move mountains, but it still won't set up a TV aerial or authorise a housing benefit payment. It's back to the to-do list and the phone calls and the begin again, Finnegan. 

It is a long, exasperating business but I guess this too shall pass and it will all come right in the end.