Bluetooth

There are lots of big changes and events that go with having ALS, lots of which you can pinpoint as having happened at a point in time or a specific place. I can still remember, in an almost complete movie-like internal visual, the moment, time and place where I fell the last time before I went into the ER to find out what was going on with my body. I can't visualize it exactly, but I know when I decided it was no longer safe for me to drive. There are plenty of things like that.

While the big events get to me in a powerful, deep emotional sense, they don't happen every day. Thank goodness for that. There are enough of them; I don't need them daily. What does happen daily are the million little things, the knife with a thousand cuts, that I once took for granted and now can no longer do, acts that were once simple which I can no longer perform.

This morning I rolled into my kitchen, at last to spy the cork hotpads I had been madly looking for over the last few days. They were in the corner on my kitchen counter. I wanted to just grab them and put them away, but I couldn't reach them. Fortunately Sam, my HCA, was there. She reached them for me so I could roll over to the dining room cabinet and put them away where they belonged. A simple task, an almost daily kind of chore, yet one I could not do.

There's also the challenge with my Panko Bread Crumbs. Helpful Health Care Aides have kindly put the bags of crumbs away, up on the highest shelf in my corner cabinet, well out of my reach. It's not a big deal; I only use them once in a while, especially for pork roasts or fried chicken or casseroles. I have had to ask a neighbour on more than one occasion to get them down for me. I would prefer to have them in one of my cannisters on the counter, but I need the cannister too. It is also up on the highest shelf of a cupboard, sitting empty, waiting for me to use it. Yet I cannot reach it. So I just look, longingly, at a minor chore that would take most people a moment, a chore that will frustrate me until I get help, yet is so small I usually forget to ask.

These are the things which drive me crazy, the little things I don't think about until the moment of need, the small tasks which used to be so easy. My friend David in Texas sent me four Bluetooth control outlet adapters, specifically so I could control certain devices now out of reach. Someone will have to set them up for me, but after that I can work them with my phone, perhaps even my computer. I wish I had a Bluetooth device for those other little chores. That way I wouldn't get so upset when I remember those things while nobody is here to help.