Day 892 in The Nanny June Care Home

The One With The Sheet Sniffing & Wind In Inappropriate Places.

A day after the hottest day of the year, the only way it was possible to enjoy a visit to the airless care home was to get outside.

I keep a shopping basket of toys in Nanny June’s room for when the Mini Morries come with me. So armed with the basket of toys I get the door to the garden unlocked and with an ever decreasingly mobile Nanny June and three Mini Morries (who I wrongly filled with chocolate moments earlier - school boy error) we slowly but chaotically make our way to the care home garden.

It’s a pleasant hour spent outside while three chocolate fuelled children hoon around the garden playing hide and seek.

After often going outside the year before, last year we were told we couldn’t go outside as the door to outside was kept locked because going outside was classed as a falling risk to residents. I quietly RAGED about this and raised it with the social worker and had a DOLs assessment done. DOL = Deprivation of Liberty. These assessors are amazing and I was so pleased to see that this year things are different. The other issue I have with doors in care homes is the key code doors. These codes change ALL THE TIME, and from start to finish I have five key codes to get through. There is a weird logic that a resident is not kept against their will (deprivation of liberty stuff again) if they are free to come and go. So if you are incapable of using a key code door you naturally lack the mental capacity which would also keep you safe outside. But what if you could use a key code but aren’t told it? Or if you potentially could but the code keeps getting changed? I raised that with the DOL’s assessor last year too.

A lovely lady resident kept wandering out into the garden and then (to the dismay of Nanny June who believed her to be a thief) started piling all our toys into the toy basket, picked up my handbag and carried both off. I didn’t stop her, she had logic and reason and purpose. The staff were so apologetic and brought my stuff back out. The patient is a tidier. The staff frequently go to move a patient into a wheelchair or do the tea trolley, turn their back for two minutes and the wheelchair or trolley is gone; whisked away by The Tidier. I did think about bringing this resident home with me, to be mutually beneficial.

Nanny June was struggling outside, despite the heat her 88 year old bones protested at the cold and she loudly and socially inappropriately declared that “the wind was getting down her tits”.

That combined with our stuff being constantly carried off and the three sugar crazed Mini Morries careering around like bowling balls in a garden of wandering old people ready to get knocked over like bowling pins, we said our goodbyes and left. Although not before booking Nanny June in for a cut and perm and asking for the bedsheets to be changed more often, starting immediately. There is little dignity in sniffing your mothers bedsheets, there must be even less dignity sleeping in them.