Prompted today by getting in my inbox an email newsletter from Carers' Trust, I realized that following Carol's death I was no longer going to need their services: I have no surviving relatives apart from distant cousins and have no intention of acting as carer for anyone else. I never needed or wanted the 'therapy groups' or courses they offered, but during the course of the sixteen years since Carol's stroke in 2005, I'd come to rely on the availability of unbiased help and support in navigating through the bureaucratic maze which being a full-time (unpaid) carer involves, and occasional battling against officialdom. I don't know what I'd have done without having the occasional drop-in session to call on whenever I needed advice (or even just a friendly ear to bend). So I sent them an email saying I was 'de-registering' but thanking them for their services, and got a lovely email in return.
I had no inkling, of course, of what lay ahead on that fateful night in February 2005 when Carol had the fall from which she realized she couldn't get up and got whisked off to hospital. We later found out that the first few hours after a stroke has occurred are crucial, and in that respect Carol was lucky. Ten days in hospital followed by a month in a place called Youell Court (in those days an 'Intermediate Care Centre' - I'd no idea such places even existed). I remember us sitting waiting eagerly for the transport which was going to be bringing her home, and then full of optimism for the future, as she walked up the stairs with the aid of a pair of crutches.
Fate, however, had other ideas. The first six months were enough to convince me that to carry on working full-time was not a viable option, and in the September of that year the County Council agreed to let me take early retirement to look after her. I carried on just doing Sundays for a further three years, but by that time what I suspect was a weakened immune system was resulting in gastric and other infections entailing hospital treatment, and each time she was coming home just a little bit less mobile than when she'd gone in. One particularly bad spell in 2009 ended with a fortnight spent over at Rugby and I remember one Friday coming home on the bus after visiting her, in tears looking through the window as the scenery passed by and I thought back, triggering memories of all the things I imagined she'd never see again. The following week she decided she'd been there long enough, so I hired a car and brought her home.
It was some time after that, as I remember, that I succumbed to the idea of having care visits to help me look after her. I'd resisted at first: she was my responsibility and it was my role as her husband to look after her - the good old 'for better and for worse' and all that. She told me once that she thought I'd got a pretty raw deal out of that contract: we both laughed. But practicality intervened and I realized she'd fare better if I had some help. In the summer of 2014 we agreed to have daily morning visits - from an agency who turned out to be unreliable to the point of being virtually useless, but we fared much better when I had to have someone to look after Carol while I had my hip replacements done, and those visits continued right up to the morning she died. Props to Yo, my regular "assistant" for doing everything that was needed with a cheerful can-do which lifted Carol's spirits up more than she'll ever know.
So what now? An eerie sensation of being at a loose end. After spending most of the last ten years, certainly all of the last five, looking after Carol as a full-time job it's odd not having that to do anymore. Don't get me wrong - I never for one second minded doing it, and I'm proud I can look back and boast that I made a good job of it, too. Just another facet of losing someone close to you, I guess: they're suddenly not there anymore and a number of things - tasks and routines - associated with them are suddenly not there, either.
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