This caretaker is all better
I was pressed into a caretaking role recently after Sue had an outpatient procedure. She’s doing well and I believe I acquitted myself nicely.
“Nicely” because most of us like to think we have some caretaking qualities. A belief we can rise to the level of kind, conscientious and concerned. Rather than treating this as a problem or an inconvenience, I looked at it as a warmup for the time I will be hoisting Sue over my shoulder, moving from one room to another like the Ancient Mariner looking for dry land.
When they wheeled her from the doctor’s office to the car, I slipped seamlessly into the caretaking space. There’s something about a woman in a wheelchair that brings out the best in a man. I felt both sorry for her and superior toward her, and there’s hardly a headier mixture of human emotion.
Look at me. So healthy, strong and capable. Look at you, so, so, the opposite. Don’t worry, consider it your lucky day because Super Caretaker is here to the rescue.
We weren’t in the car yet and I had already cast myself in heroic terms. I sat tall in the driver’s seat and drove her home where I would care for her in the way only SC can. With a stiff upper lip but well aware of the generous sacrifice I had been making for the last 15 minutes.
Time to employ my caretaking voice designed to put the patient at ease. This requires speaking slowly and enunciating every syllable. It’s the same voice you use when you’re talking to a child, a foolish person or somebody who’s not long for this world. When we got home it was dinnertime. “Would you like some chicken soup?” I asked. One of us had planned for this day and one of us wasn’t me. I was offering her chicken soup she had made herself a few days earlier, a recipe that required half a day and everything short of raising, offing and plucking the chicken.
I did, however, have to ladle the soup in the bowl, which had me gauging appetite with how delicious the chicken soup looked and smelled. No reason to waste soup I hadn’t made anyway.
“Let me do the dishes,” I said, pledging to do something I did almost every night anyway because Sue had basically planned, shopped, cooked and made most of the money for 41 straight years.
In the middle of the night, I noticed her water glass was almost empty. While I gave myself credit for noticing it was empty, I decided not to mention it because in order to refill her glass, it was best to turn the light on in the bathroom and should I have done that, I would have risked waking myself up potentially costing SC important sleep.
This decision made sense because the last thing any patient wants to do is to wear out his or her caretaker even if it means the patient becoming dehydrated and slipping into a coma. It wasn’t as if the soup didn’t have water in it.
If that wasn’t reason enough, caretaking duties are better dispatched between the hours of 8 and 5 with a two-hour break in the morning devoted to exercise, an hour and a half for breakfast, two hours around noon for both lunch and a nap, which eventually reduces caretaking responsibilities to about 30 minutes unless the patient gets too demanding then it can drop precipitously from there.
Rather than seeing this as a deficiency in one’s caretaking, I’m of the mind the quicker the patient assumes both more than their share of the daily responsibilities, and their partner’s, the faster they will heal.
Day 2 was more chicken soup and thank goodness one of us had the foresight to make it ahead of time.
Day 3. What do you mean there’s no more chicken soup? If you’d really thought ahead, you’d planned a second meal because Rule No. 1: Keep your caretaker strong, rested and healthy.
By Day 4, I was over this caretaking thing. How do people do this? I wanted my life back or even more of it than I had before, which was quite a bit.
By Day 4, I was ready to put her on an ice floe and push her gently out to sea. Day 5. Who needs an ice floe? Swim. Day 6. I’ll be in the garage cleaning my bike. It’s really dirty and it could take awhile because the chain is super gunky.
Day 7. I’ll be eating at my desk. Don’t bother to call. I really need to concentrate so if you want me, just scream.
Day 10. I have no idea what happened to Day 8 or 9, but Sue is fully recovered. Ask her, but I’d like to think I had something to do with it.