The lady who comes to clean

At present, Dad doesn't have anything resembling a care plan.  That will obviously change over the next few weeks, but one little bit of support that is in place, has been for some years now, is his cleaning lady, who shall be called Zoe.  Originally employed by a firm that messed her about rather, Zoe started working for herself a while back and gives Dad an hour a week.  It was apparent that she hoovers, but I rang her up to see if she did anything else, and to discuss what she'd observed.

Quite a lot, of course.  In fact, atrocious though the state of the house is, she normally finds it worse when she calls.  In the little time she has she's tidied up some of his heaps, done bits of washing up and generally made it possible to walk from one room to another without tripping over some discarded bit of junk.  "I tell him off a lot", she confided, almost apologising.  You tell him off as much as you like, I replied; the trouble is, he won't remember.

Zoe won't have been to see Dad over the Christmas holiday period, which was why the house was in particular disarray at that time.  To be honest, I'm glad she hadn't been, because her absence and the resulting chaos let me know exactly what I was dealing with.  Her cleaning and tidying up had been serving to mask the extent of Dad's decline, which others might have spotted but for Zoe's work.  As a self-employed cleaner she had no supervisor with whom she might have thought it fit to share her concerns.

I told her Dad's diagnosis.  She was sympathetic, but also a little surprised, which in its turn surprised me, not least because one of her other clients has dementia too.  Didn't she recognise what was happening?

Well, there is observing, and then there is interpreting.  Zoe's not stupid and can use her eyes.  On the other hand she's not medically qualified, which means she - like a good many other folk - doesn't have the competence to draw from what she has observed the conclusion that would be obvious if she'd had training and experience in dementia  In the absence of that, I guess one would fight shy of sticking the label on a client about whom all she knows is that he's old, and not coping as well as he used to.  Which I guess applies to the population at large: all the signs of dementia might be staring you in the face, but you don't know what it is.  And the word, nay the condition, is scary so you don't use it if you don't have to.  "That Dennis, you know, he gets ever so muddled these days."