Heroes at home

Rachel Kelly’s Holy Grail? Heroes to look after her parents

The perfect carer

The call came when I was 20. I was in my flat on the Cowley Road, in my final year as an Oxford undergraduate and trying to make sense of the cahiers de doléances, the lists of public grievances compiled in the first months of 1789 ahead of the French Revolution.

It was my mother. My father, then in his mid-50s, had suffered a debilitating stroke. He was in intensive care. I packed my bag immediately. Family life would never be the same again.

He was left partially disabled. With an awesome effort of will, he made a remarkable recovery, but it took him the best part of the next decade. After nearly six months in hospital, he learned how to walk again, thanks to a rigorous physiotherapy regime and his own immense determination.

But, despite his best efforts, my father – a writer like my mother – was left with limited movement in his left leg and none at all in his left arm. My mother became his carer.

This can happen to anyone, from someone like my mother to Eleanor Roosevelt, a future first lady, who, from the early 1920s, cared for Franklin after he suffered an attack of polio left him paralysed.

From the moment my father woke to the moment he went to bed, my mother was at his side.

In between, she would finish his anecdotes when he forgot the punchline, discreetly remove his glass if he had had one too many of claret and accompany him pretty much wherever he went (apart from the men-only Beefsteak Club, his last redoubt). All of this she did with selfless good humour, tact and love. In short, she was the perfect carer.

Then she fell ill herself with blood cancer. Even so, she remained my father’s primary carer until her last few months. At her hospital appointments, she would always impress on her own doctors that she needed to be well to look after my father.

Now, two years after her death, my siblings and I have been grappling with how to replace her. What makes for the ideal carer?

As different carers have come and gone, I realise that, of course, there is no such thing as the perfect carer, other than my mother.

Rather like The Moon Under Water – the fictitious, perfect pub described by George Orwell – the perfect carer needs an impossible range of qualities. Naturally, we have not found anyone that has them all.

Is it realistic to hope for someone who is as comfortable and competent with affairs of digestion as they are with Lermontov, the Georgian poet and object of my father’s academic enthusiasm? Or one who spots UTI symptoms and comments on the Met’s version of La Bohème?

The truth is that each carer brings different gifts. There is Rosie, whose cheese soufflé delights my father, but whose chief cultural delight is Youtube videos of Filipina pop stars.

Then there’s Katie, who loves Handel, but who cannot cook. Then there was Carmelita, who combined her caring work with being a nurse. While brilliant at diagnosing ailments, she never cracked a smile.

So, there is no perfection, and it is not to be expected or sought for in someone who is routinely paid around £10 an hour. But there is one characteristic of a carer that is essential. They need to be someone who is responsible, and qualified enough, to administer medication in the correct dosage.

That might sound an easy ask but, in the last few months of my mother’s life, when she needed a carer herself, her drug regime was complicated. There were differentsized and different-coloured drugs to be taken at different times of the day in different combinations, and with or without food.

Tragically, we had one carer who administered the wrong doses of my mother’s chemotherapy drugs. Over several months, she gave my mother too little of one medication from the pillbox organiser.

We will never know if she might have survived longer had she had the correct, stronger dose to start with. We only discovered what had happened in an appointment with her oncologist, to which I accompanied her.

‘So that’s why my side-effects were so mild,’ my mother joked. She never blamed the carer, saying anyone could have got in a muddle, though she agreed she should leave.

There was only one blessing to this otherwise sad story.

The carer in question had come highly recommended as the ‘perfect’ helper. Now I know that such a person does not exist, I can celebrate instead the bits of perfection in all the different carers I have known. The carer who travelled all over London in search of gulls’ eggs, a sudden fancy of my father’s. Or the one who nursed him for 48 hours on the trot, sleeping at his side, like a loyal dog. Carers have given so much to our family ever since my father fell ill all those years ago.

Rachel Kelly is author of Singing in the Rain: 52 Practical Steps to Happiness (Short Books)