Litter and blood

Today I sorted through the Litter Files. Carol was good on minutiae. She got several small grants over the years for the Barkisland Big Tidy Up group, grants from the council mainly but also local businesses and one from Greggs! There were records of every meeting, every grant application and every single item of expenditure, complete with receipt. Carol never told me much about what she was doing and so it was good to see everything she had achieved and I am proud of her. I wish she had said a bit more at the time.

Then the notebooks detailing every bit of litter from here to Halifax and every interaction with litter pickers and with the council. The last notebook she’d used during 2017 was full of indecipherable scribbles and some small drops of blood. Her writing had been pretty clear in the early days but in the last part of her life it got very scratchy, mainly because she was writing while she was falling asleep.

As for the blood, well we did a lot of blood with arterial bleeds at the closing part of a dialysis session. You have to stop the bleeding from both the arterial and the venous sites where the needles have been inserted. Sometimes she would be too tired and sleepy to work to stop the flow so I would attend and hold the special blood stopper pad down hard. Sometimes an arterial bleed was occurring before I got there and then Carol would be fussing about not getting blood on the carpet, the carpet behind a door and down some steps so quite a challenge even for her though I suppose if she waved her arm around with the door open she could have managed it.

My next job would be to clear up the blood from the floor, the wall and anywhere else, later I would have to put some paint on the wall. Even though it was messy I quite liked having a part in her treatment and she trusted me to do it.

It’s probable that Carol was taking litter notes while dialysing, it’s also possible that the blood drops weren’t from an arterial bleed and were just from her bleeding fingers. The cocktail of drugs gave her lots of painful split finger problems and they would bleed too.

The notebook brought it all back. I certainly don’t miss the hassle of haemodialysis but it bought us some time, some of it was stressful but some of it was normal and loving and definitely better than no time at all.

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