Thursday, June 23, 2016

There Is No Spoon

Rosemarie still spends a lot of time in her room, even when she is up. I prefer to give her supper in her room (we can reheat the food in the microwave) and ditto lunch if I or another visitor are there. We also have treats like chocolate trifle in the fridge.

If she is in bed 'sleepy' there is also the requirement to give her fluid.

All this requires spoons. 

There aren't always spoons.

To begin with I took in packets of plastic spoons like you use for picnics, but Rosemarie started to bite down hard on them and the last thing we needed was her swallowing sharp pieces of plastic. 

So I thought about the metal spoons provided by the home. 

There is usually (but not always) a clean spoon in the clean beaker on her small chest of drawers ready for mixing up thickened juice. They bring one with the meal (for the main course, to be washed and used again if they provide a dessert). 

However, mostly these get cleared away regularly and I often arrived at Rosemarie's room to find no spoons - and sometimes no beaker for the juice. The beaker is less of a problem because there are usually some in one of the lounges on Rosemarie's floor, but the only source of spoons outside mealtimes is the kitchen on the lower ground floor. It probably only takes 10 minutes to go and get some, but it means having to find someone to keep an eye on Rosemarie if she is in her chair, and in any case it just seems.....wrong.

So I collected the odd spoon that came my way and tried to make sure there were always three in the room: one for the fridge treats, one spare for fluids and one spare in case they didn't bring one for the yoghurt or whatever they were going to give her for dessert.

I didn't think it was excessive. It wasn't going to break the bank, and I made no effort to hide them: they were in a bowl on top of the microwave. 

After a few days they started disappearing. At first I thought the staff may think they were dirty or had been left out for collection, so I moved them to one of the drawers. They started disappearing from there too.

I had also retained a plastic cup with a sippy cup lid, so I could prepare a thickened juice drink to take down to the garden safely without having to go hunting round the building for one of the rare lids.

That disappeared too. 

And a neat little note appeared from Good Nurse, asking me not to retain spoons and cups in the room, saying that they were for the use of all residents (!)

I didn't want to go to war about this so I calmly brought in a couple of spoons from home and left them in the drawer. I also brought some of my own ceramic cups so I could make tea.

Today one of my spoons disappeared.

I think we will have to have words.

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