Picking up pieces is a serious business

This was going to be a run of the mill post about bits of equipment breaking down etc. but life has a way of tripping you up just when you thought you'd tied your shoe laces really well. A medical emergency outside work means his day nurse is suddenly unavailable this morning - don't worry, the contingency we insisted on last time (and the time before) will kick in and all will be well. Er, no. No contingency yet again - lots of kerfuffle and eventually one of his other nurses agrees to fill in part of the day, after his night nurse has stayed on for excessive hours to cover. (This is why we need all the goodwill we can get with the nursing team.)

Oh, and in the middle of this, wheelchair services decide to bring his 4 o clock appointment forward to 1 o clock at no notice and the day gets even more complicated. We pick him up and cover the parts of the day the nurse can't (because understandably, she has commitments with her own family) and hand him back for the next shift.

We know the original nurse is unlikely to make it in tomorrow (because she's texted us telling us what the problem is herself) but if anything has been organised about his care, no one seems to know what, and they've definitely not told us. So current plan is for him to go into his day service as normal, and if there isn't a nurse there, he'll come back to us.

I've paid my electricity bill, so setting the fan off for the s**t to hit it tomorrow should be no problem at all.

Oh, and some of the broken equipment got mended and the bits that didn't we had to find temporary replacements for - because nobody else has.

God help us if we'd been on Direct Payments and had to organise even more of this than we have. One day, we won't be here - and one of the critical pieces won't get picked up in time. If he's lucky it will just mean pain and/or distress. If he's unlucky, he'll die. I'm not sure which is the best outcome. (This is not a joke or me being melodramatic, I really don't know.)

P.S. in the middle of this, my mother is ill (she's 84) and lives 25 miles away. I really don't like choosing between my son and my mother.