Apologies if I’m not posting this in the right place…
Hi folks, I’m new here and I’ll be upfront, I can be a bit of a rambler at times.
Right now I am exhausted and ever so slightly desperate.
I have been caring for my elderly neighbour (she’s 76 and I’m 46) for just over a year now. She was housebound due to arthritis (we live in first floor flats and she could not get down the stairs) and is now chair bound following a couple of falls in March. Until December last year I was going in about 3-4 times a week when she was having a bad day (arthritis) to help with whatever she needed (cleaning, meal prep/cooking for her and her dog, shopping, picking up dropped nuts…). She doesn’t have access to the internet so I was putting in a weekly shopping order plus ordering bits and bobs that she needed. I also had to find a dog walker and I started the wheels in motion to get her the help that she needed. I did my research and contacted social services to arrange a needs assessment. As I’m sure you’ll all understand this involved lots of chasing up and a whole lot of time on hold listening to God-awful “music”! I met with my neighbour and the social services and eventually they got a physio involved but despite my encouragement & the physio’s urging the exercise plan given to her was “too painful”, “too much” and the physio “doesn’t understand”…
This whole journey has been somewhat complicated by the fact that my neighbour also suffers with paranoid schizophrenia which is preventing her from allowing services to help her to move to more suitable accommodation (it is a very long story which I have no energy to go into right now!). I too have my own health issues - severe anorexia nervosa (for 30 yrs), CKD, epilepsy and anxiety. I’m also a person who finds saying “no” very difficult which is probably why in December last year I wound up in hospital for 10 days with a tubo-ovarian abscess and sepsis. Whilst there I also had a couple of grand mal seizures after having been seizure-free for 5 years. I had used up all my reserves and my body was complaining! I was discharged just before Christmas and the day after I was discharged I went to see my neighbour to let her know I was back and see if she needed anything…
She seemed uninterested in how I was but had plenty of moans about how she had been! She then said, fairly sharply, that I needed to leave because she had someone coming in to do her shopping for her! So I did.
My own social worker & my neighbours social worker assured me that my neighbour had care in place and I should step back and focus on my recovery. So I did just that. I knew if I saw my neighbour I would get dragged back into her orbit of influence (she can be quite demanding and like I said I find it so hard to say no!)…
At the end of March I had a recurrence of the abscess and spent another 5 days in hospital and about a week after I was discharged a kidney stone (which I never knew I had) decided to go on manoeuvres causing me the most pain I think I’ve ever experienced! Again I wound up in hospital, although only briefly thank goodness!
About a week after the kidney stone incident my neighbour had a fall. The reason I was made aware of this is because the police had to be called to break her door down and on hearing the banging I rushed to see what the heck was going on.
The upshot of all this is that I’m now back to being my neighbour’s carer. Now though she is completely incapacitated and so my duties are daily between 3.30pm and 5pm(ish) (one of our other neighbours takes the “morning shift” - walking the dog & getting breakfast) and then I’m “on call” pretty much 24/7 for anything else (“I fancy a cup of tea”, “I’ve dropped a nut on the floor”).
I feed and water her dog (which involves poaching chicken), do laundry, make her sandwiches for tea, make her cups of tea, ensure she has clean water and whatever other refreshment she might like. I wash up, wipe down surfaces etc… I also keep an eye on her legs as they are now so swollen (I was away for 2 months and on seeing her legs again I was shocked at the deterioration considering I was told she had care in place). I had to point out the fact that she had a nasty looking green patch on one leg which obviously hadn’t been picked up on - despite the fact carers apparently wash her legs everyday. Eventually my harping on about it meant a doctor came out to assess it.
I’ve found the system and the amount of chasing up and chasing down services and people so mentally draining.
Anyway, apologies for the long-winded nature of this post - I did warn you that I’m a rambler!
There’s more, of course, to this story - isn’t there always? But for now my brain is fried so I’ll pop this up for now & just send good wishes to you all - what you do really matters 
… So glad I found this place!