Full Time Care

…an even darker lining. That’s how she’s thinking today. After a week or more of stressing whether her parents are going to come and visit unannounced, my lady has hit rock bottom. Depression, to add to the anxiety and alcohol.

She’s spent the entire day - and I mean the entire day - being utterly pessimistic about absolutely everything. For example, she had an application form for a volunteer position that’s interesting. I commented that there was a question about receiving government benefits: they ask if you’re getting any so that they can avoid affecting how much money you get. To me, that’s a nice thing. To her, it was massively negative that volunteering could affect the benefits.

The whole day has been like that. In about twelve hours of hanging out together, she’s said one positive thing - that she liked the drawing she did this evening. Absolutely every other comment has been negative.

So I’m going to go and eat something sweet to cheer me up, watch a bit of a film and go to sleep, in the hopes of not having crappy pessimistic dreams.

One of the hardest things to deal with as a full time carer living with someone bordering on alcoholism isn’t the evening of inebriation. Of course, that’s pretty difficult, as some of my posts indicate! Still, the really tough part is the aftermath. The next day.

My partner usually spends the day after a drinking session recovering: in her case, this means sleeping most of the day. She’s someone who needs a lot of sleep anyway (her average of nine or ten hours is significantly larger than mine, down near four or six), but after a session she’ll just stay in bed and effectively lose an entire 24-hour period.
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Good grief. I could quite easily just repost two of my previous entries today. My partner’s been in a bottle again, and it’s been one of those evenings: we had the drawing frenzy, the repetitive music and the overwhelming desire to scream “SHUT UP!” as she babbled on and on.

So I’m going to talk about good things instead! Today’s been a brilliant day for good news. First off, I spoke to a guy at the DWP’s call centre and kicked off my incapacity benefits claim again: I tend to have a really good time on the phone with them because - apart from the fact that I try to be nice to anyone with a crappy job - it helps that I used to work in the same branch of the government. They don’t have to go slowly through everything, but can skip and jump along, knowing that I understand and will stop them if I need clarification. It’s nice to think that at least one call in their very long day will make them smile.
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Things are slowly getting back to ‘normal’ here, not that normal in this case is very normal at all, but you know what I mean. My partner managed to do her workout today, which is excellent, but still has that bizarre obsession in her head: that her parents are going to appear on our doorstep. I don’t get it. I mean, she’s not a raving lunatic or anything, but she just can’t let that go. Thankfully, rather than turning to a bottle, she went to bed.

So I went off into town this afternoon to do some food shopping and drop off a letter for our government benefits. Here in the UK it’s all centralised these days, and the system sucks. I can say that with a small amount of authority, since the job I just lost was… processing claims for benefits!

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She’s been drinking again. I suppose it’s a reaction to letting the chance of a job go today, but my lady spent the better part of the evening getting drunk, even though it’s only two days since she last did that. A small part of me is disappointed, of course, but mostly I’m just glad she’s finally asleep.

You see, she recently dug out some old IAM CDs - a French rap group. There are some very amusing tracks on them, as they were a pretty humorous bunch of guys, but being ‘asked’ (i.e. told) to listen to the same funny song five times in two hours is not something I enjoy. Even worse is getting her into bed at last and then having to spend another fifteen minutes listen to her singing loudly, making up her own words. Yes, she’s funny. Just not late at night and at high volume when we have neighbours who have kids.

It makes me want to pound her head to a pulp so that she’ll shut up. Coming from a pacifist who has and would never harm another person, you can imagine the level of annoyance.

Well, so much for Interview Day. We were awake really early so that we’d have time for my partner to do a bit of final revision before heading off - not an easy thing for me this morning, as I was up til about 1:30 last night. The connection kept yo-yoing and I couldn’t get hold of a phone number to ask about some possible jobs, so I was stuck in front of the PC ’til it worked properly.

Anyhow, after a bit of a chat, my lady stated that she wasn’t really interested in this job, because it won’t make anything better. Since I’m not working now, any money she earns will basically reduce the amount of help we get from the government, so we’d actually be worse off. It’s simply not worth putting in hours of work for that. I had to agree, really - although the secondary effects are good (to be out working, socially active and so on), it hardly seems to make sense to pay train fares just so we can have less money.

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Originally, I thought I’d use that title as a bit of a continued play on words over the last few days, but the evening’s events turned out rather more, er, “ketchuppy” than I expected.

I spent most of the afternoon hunting job opportunities for my lady: since I’m once again online for a while, all my regular emails arrived and, once I’d gone through three or four hundred of them, I checked through the appropriate jobs. there’s a couple of new opportunities there for her, which is great news. She was downstairs, revising for her interview again, but after a few hours her brain caved in and she decided to stop for the day.

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Excellent. The open connection is still working, so I can continue catching up with things online. I was up til about 1:30 last night messing around with various websites and so on, for fear of losing any access today (or maybe just because I was enjoying myself!).

My partner’s having a good day today: she hasn’t had a drop since Thursday night and she’s working on preparing her interview.

It occurred to me that this might seem strange to many people: so much work just for an interview? This is where one of the big differences in people becomes apparent and my personal situation of carer is so very dissimilar to hers as the cared-for.

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Hurrah, hurray! Although my Internet connection is still dead, some kind soul decided to start up a wifi hot spot within range of my house, so I am able to get online - albeit unreliably, insecurely and maybe just for today!

Since I last posted, it’s been a bit of a rough ride. My partner’s had a couple of periods where she was drinking every two days again, falling back into that self-destructive cycle of ‘get drunk, spend a day recovering, get drunk, spend a day recovering’. Mostly, this was due to her anxiety at the possibility of her parents arriving (which they didn’t), but it hasn’t been helped by crappy weather and some minor health problems.

She’s still on her diet, you see. This, in itself, isn’t a bad thing - it’s just that she has taken to eating a lot of vegetables. One of those is bean sprouts, which have a rather high fibre content… or at least, that’s what it seems, given her sudden need to, uh, spend a lot of time in the smallest room in the house, shall we say?

Me, I’m playing catch-up for the moment, trying to get through hundreds of emails, publish a couple of things I’ve written and make an entrance on my blogs. It’s going to be a day or two before I make much sense, at a guess, but it’s really good to be back online. Keep your fingers crossed for continued connectivity!

My Internet connection is doing a remarkably good impression of a yo-yo at the moment. I may not be around consistently for a while. Please bear with me while I deal with this technical difficulty…