Full Time Care

I knew I shouldn’t have said things were getting better. It’s always the kiss of death. As soon as I’d posted that entry a couple of days ago, I had a feeling something was going to happen, and it has.

Quite apart from being treated like crap yesterday evening during my partner’s most recent bout of drinking, I woke up feeling awful today. When i went to check how things were at the bank, I got the surprise I’d been expecting: suddenly, the balance has dropped. The worst thing is that I don’t know why: like with most banks, they’ll quite happily reduce the available balance in preparation for something being withdrawn, but don’t immediately post the details. They wait until the transaction’s gone through to actually display what’s happening.

So today, I’m suddenly a big chunk of money short and I don’t know why. It looks like the tax rebate cheque I had deposited late was refused, so I shall have to contact the Inland Revenue to find out how to get another, for beginners. But that doesn’t explain everything. There’s still a lot missing. I have no idea why, but I have this ominous foreboding that something bad has happened. I hope it’s not something like the identity theft I went through last year - that was a total nightmare.

I hate it when banks pretend they’re being helpful with Internet access to accounts and so on, then deal with it in a totally old-fashioned, give-us-your-money way. It’s so two-faced.

I haven’t said much about my partner’s alcohol problem over the last week or more. This isn’t because it’s magically gone away, but because I wanted to write about more pleasant things than the ongoing torment of seeing her slowly destroy herself.

On the contrary, her addiction is back in full force. For the past ten days or so, she’s been drinking every other day. There’s always a good reason, of course: anxiety over a possible voluntary job, anxiety over her analyst being annoyed at her inability to get out and do stuff, anxiety over her parents’ possible reaction to a single sentence in a letter she sent, anxiety over our cat’s cystitis problem… you get the idea.

Bizarrely, I’ve been less affected by this resurgence of inebriation than I would have imagined. I suppose it’s partly because a lot of my other stresses have diminished: we have a little money in the bank, our rent is paid for the month, the house is clean, we’re not being evicted, the benefits are all sorted out and my back has generally been a bit better. That said, I’m in a lot of pain as an aftermath of all the housework for today’s landlord visit, but that’ll pass.

She’s still very determined to reduce her wine intake, too. It’s not as if she just says “Sod it” and opens another bottle: she knows that she’s dependent, she knows it sucks and she’s desperate to break the two-day cycle. That’s our first goal over the coming days. If we can break the chain, like she did at the start of the year, we can slowly increase the number of days between bouts. One positive influence is that the housework and exercise she’s been doing has helped her lose some weight: this will probably be my main way of convincing her not to drink. The longer she can go without alcohol, the more chance her body has of throwing away all that fermented sugar and continuing the weight loss process.

Saturday will be the difficult day. If she can avoid drinking then, we’ll be on the way.

Anyone else remember that episode of ST:TOS (that’s Star Trek: The Original Series for the less geeky among you) where Spock mind-melds with a rock monster, the Horta? He puts his hands on it and starts shouting “Paiiiiiiiiiin”. Well, that’s how I feel today!

We have our landlord visit tomorrow. Every six months, the agency sends someone round just to check that we’re not knocking holes in the walls, making virgin sacrifices in the shoe cupboard and generally keeping the place in order. So for the last four days, I’ve been doing housework - and it’s killing my back. All that scrubbing, mopping, dusting, hoovering (or vacuuming for the Americans) and washing is not recommended activity when your back is fragile.

Still, it’s all done now and everything is spick and span. Well, almost: I still have the loo to clean and the tiny front garden to tidy. Unfortunately, the wind blows crap into our garden all the time and, because it’s so small and right up against the path, adolescent (or drunk) passers-by tend to dump tings over the fence into a corner.

I also had a call from the local Job Centre today about our benefits. Apparently, I get to choose which ones I want, since I’m sick and a carer. I’ll go through that some other time, as it might help people in a similar situation. Suffice it to say that the lady who called was lovely, of course, since we used to work together. Actually, that’s unfair - I know she’s lovely to everyone she calls it was nice to speak to her again, though!

Enough for the moment. I have to go and move a huge pile of washing into the bathroom.

In my last post, I promised that I’d talk a bit about how things are finally starting to come together for us here. This blog’s only been around for a couple of months, so you can’t know the mess we’ve been in over the last few years. I suppose I should start with a bit of that. I’ll summarise for today, as it’ll take several posts to cover everything!

Where to begin? Well, we’ve been in a lot of financial trouble since returning to the UK. The cost of living here is significantly higher than I imagined and, well, my lady is not the most frugal of people. At least, she wasn’t: that’s changed over time - or has been forced to. A couple of years ago, I left my job at the RSPCA to earn more money, since we were spending far more than I was earning. This was partly due to the beginning of my partner’s alcohol problem.
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Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide…

Oh, alright, I’ll stop singing Queen songs! I shall, however, explain my sudden outburst of Freddie Mercury-ness: I had a comment from a visitor the other day, asking if “this neurotic woman” I write about is actually real. Apparently my blog sometimes sounds more like a novel than real life.

Well, yes. She’s most definitely real. Sometimes reality is, as they say, stranger than fiction. In all honesty, I would never have imagined - some sixteen years ago, when I met her - that she would turn out to be such a psychological mess. I never thought I’d end up caring for someone on a daily basis, working harder at it than at a ‘normal’ job. I could never have envisaged the depth and breadth of suffering and anguish she goes through every day, and all the struggling I’ve had to do to keep up, to keep the house going, to pay the rent, to keep food on the table and everything else.

I’ve sacrificed almost everything in life for her over the last few years. Tens of thousands of pounds, putting myself into more debt than I’ve ever had before (and that’s saying something, since I’ve been badly in debt in the past), two jobs, virtually all social contact with family and friends, a car, an apartment and even decent food when things were really bad and she couldn’t stop drinking. Surviving on instant noodles and baked beans - with a smile - while she eats normally, is an art form I would prefer not to have mastered.

In return, she has - despite my almost constant online whining - made me a very happy man. She’s my soul-mate. Every day, she makes me laugh. She’s the smartest woman I’ve ever met. She’s la femme de ma vie (’the love of my life’ would be the closest translation for that). Yes, it’s tough sometimes. Yes, it’s almost bloody downright impossible at other times. But it’s worth it. And finally - finally! - things are starting to work out for the better. I’ll talk more about that another time.

In other news: my connection sucks. It took me 35 minutes to load this page. I’ll try to keep entries going, but as you can see from the calendar over on the right, I’ve missed quite a few days because of this problem. I’m working on it. Honest.

Today.com also just redid all their templates, so the main page has changed. Not my fault. I’ll figure that out when I have a slightly better connection, or at least a more stable one. Bear with me until I figure out all the options, please. Thanks.

I woke up this morning feeling awful: I think I’ve caught a cold or something. The weather here’s taken a turn for the worse over the last couple of days and, with my normal sleeping patterns disrupted by being woken at ungoldy hours to make my partner something to eat, I’m suffering. I guess my immune system’s just a bit out of whack. I was supposed to go into town and grab some shopping, but I’m really glad I didn’t - it actually snowed this afternoon!

Both my lady and I have been slobbing around today - she as a result of yesterday’s drinking, me due to the snot situation. Normally, I’d have enjoyed the day, but there’s a bit of an imbalance in the way things work out. If she’s sick, she stays in bed and I take care of her and everything else. If I’m sick… she stays in bed and I take care of her and everything else. Ho hum.

Apologies for the somewhat choppy entry: my brain’s not functioning very well. I hope it’s better tomorrow.

…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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