The carer: Ruth, 36, Cambridge I’ve been a carer for elderly and vulnerable people, off and on, for almost 20 years, most of them for an agency. Extreme cleanliness always bothers me. When you walk into a house and it’s immaculate, and there’s a huge list of dos and don’ts pinned up, it suggests to me that everything is going to be very ordered and particular, and that can make it a lot harder for me to tap into what that person really needs. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum – you find sheets that haven’t been changed for months. Animal faeces on the floor. I once visited a woman who saved milk by leaving it out on the worktops. Some of it was green. It took a good few weeks to persuade her that it wasn’t a very good idea to keep it. Having family around is helpful – maybe not their physical presence in the house, but just knowing they’re involved. On the other hand, when there are family who don’t allow you any breathing space, you do wish they’d just bugger off. Sometimes, family ask you to tackle things they can’t, so they’ll instruct you to have a clear out but “don’t tell our mum”, so you become the Big Bad Carer. Now and then, family can get jealous, especially if they see that the relationship you have with their parent is very different from their own. I understand that it’s hard. I’ve been described as “the daughter I never had” in front of one woman’s real daughter. People might say: “You don’t know our mum” but often we don’t know our own parents as people. Children’s ideas are about what the children want, not what the parents want. Sometimes, your visit is just 15 minutes, because all you have to do is give them their medication. It’s your job to wake them up, get them washed and dressed, and give them breakfast and their tablets and whatever else they need – you’re usually allocated 30 minutes for that. The social element of your job – the fact that you might be the only person they speak to that day – is never acknowledged. I’ve done things I really shouldn’t have done. I sometimes took people to my house. I had a lovely man, one of my favourites, who loved to have a silver service dinner every day. Then, unfortunately, his money started running out, so a manager came in to assess him. They decided to cut his allotted time to 30 minutes, which meant there was only time for us to cook and serve his meal, not sit and talk to him while he ate it. He had to have microwave dinners, on his own. Sometimes he just wouldn’t eat it, because he had no motivation to. There’s never enough time. The care service is made up of layers and layers of people who just don’t have enough time.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 22:28:02 +0000
Trending Topics
© 2015