Tuesday 10 May 2011

Special Delivery

Take one month's plastics (daily disposable bottle and tube) for two girls' tube feed. Not including the feed itself, extension tubes, syringes, spare buttons, feed pumps and chargers).

Add one month's medical supplies (sterile water for humidifier, dressings, tape) for one childAnd a selected portion of both girls' monthly drugs
(other half of the cupboard far too messy for display. And no, I don't feed the girls fish food!).

Throw a month's supply of breathing circuits into the mixAnd a month's worth of catheter supplies
Add suction catheters - this is a box of one hundredwhich could last us months, or could be used in a couple of very bad days. So multiply that box by three, to give us a very bad week's worth kept in stock.

Next bring more miscellaneous medical suppliesMouth swabs, spare tubing for the nebuliser, syringes and fingertip probes.

multiply white box by ten under one bed and six under the other, to include wipes - wet and dry - disposable gloves and aprons, creams and lotions and sprays, instruction manuals, chargers and batteries, oxygen and spare tubing, more dressings.
And then go and fetch a month's worth of incontinence pads.
Navigate your way around one indoor wheelchair, two posturally supportive armchairs, one back up manual wheelchair, one off-road three-wheeler, one wheelchair charger, one ventilator, one CPAP machine, one humidifier, random assorted splints and braces, spare bonnets and chin straps, feed - thankfully supplied in powdered form - and endless buckets of fruit juice.

Tiptoe past the sheer volume of laundry produced when an overnight drainage bag disconnects from a catheter two nights in a row, flooding bed, floor, and everything stored under the bed with a litre of urine. Slide sideways past the tent, previously stored under the bed, and wonder whether this really does mean you now need to replace it.

Step back. Into the cat food bowl. Shuffle sideways into the neat pile of regurgitated cat food and fur ball. Mutter lots.

And wonder how you managed to forget to buy chocolate where you are possibly going to squeeze storage space for three months' worth of pads, when the deliveries change.

Tia

4 comments:

R said...

Yikes!

Suggestions:
*Bottles and giving sets can be rinsed and re-used; especially if they're only/mostly having water run through them.
*Decent small garden shed for supplies - can organise things into one- or two-week boxes so you just fetch one in every now and then. Probably also sensible home for seldom-used backup chair/s if you have room.
*Check make of legbags, nightbags and catheters - they are NOT all mutually compatible and combining, say, ProSys with Coloplast will drastically increase risk of leaks.
Tape the joins if needed.

Tina said...

Then consider the sheer volume of that which you need to pack into the family vehicle to go on holiday and understand why we often need to rush out shopping for forgotten "ordinary"things on out first day of holiday!!
We get 3 months of pads at a time nightmare!
And the council say storage's avpersonal choice and nit accounted for in the DFG.

Yvonne said...

That's some pile of stuff. I thought finding a place for the cereal boxes here was tricky!

pippinsmum said...

Um, did you say you lived in The Tardis?

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