Laundry Day Blues

Doing the laundry is a task set which is rapidly leaving my repertoire. To those of you who say "hurray" to my loss of this essential part of living, just bear in mind that I have no way to "run a quick load through the machine". I can't wash my favourite shirt to get it ready for tomorrow, not can a launder the wine towels after we make wine.

The set of tasks which make up doing the laundry start with sorting. Bear in mind that I cannot pick up a full laundry basket from the floor, so I have to dump all the laundry on the floor, then sort it into the baskets on my bed. However my arms and core muscles are sufficiently weak that I am unable to directly pick up the laundry from the floor; I pick it up with a grabby stick. For me, this is a long and tedious task, one which has now gotten to the point where it is so tiring I can do it no longer. I get a quarter way in, then my arms give out. So Home Care does this now.

The next step is getting the laundry down the hall and into the laundry room. If I have only one basket of laundry, or if I leave the laundry unsorted, I can make this run quite handily. After all, the chair is doing the work while I go along for the ride. The doors are a challenge, but I'm still capable, mostly.

Once in the laundry room, I face the difficulty of starting the washing machine so I can toss in the soap pod, then opening the lid with proper gentleness so as to not shut off the machine. Sometimes I wait for a while, just so when I open the lid, if it hits the control button it doesn't really matter. The pod and water are in already. It is, however, becoming so much more difficult to lift the laundry out of the basket and into the machine, another tiring task.

When the laundry is done, I now have a wet load of laundry to put into the dryer. I can do it, with some struggle. In fact the most difficult part is those last few items at the bottom, inevitably small things where somehow I have to reach deep into the bowels of the machine to get them. These days I use the grabby stick, yet even that requires a level of lift and contortion that wears on me.

Once the laundry is in the dryer, I just hit the button and go away, except that the button is atop the dryer at the back of the machine, another rugged reach. Mostly I can still make it. Mostly. So I leave, and wait for an hour before going back. Alternatively, an HCA has done the washing and put the laundry in the dryer, all possible within a two hour visit. That leaves me with retrieving the dry laundry.

The challenge in retrieving the dry laundry is that I must get it out of the machine, a low and extended reach into the drum, after which I must lift it up, over the top of the dryer and into the basket. I lost the ability to do that long ago, so now I use a grabby stick. Unfortunately the weakness in both my arms is sufficiently profound that after a couple of lifts, my arms just give up. They don't work. I have to stop, sometimes for as long as a half hour, before I can try again.

All in all, I'd rather just leave this to health care. Alas my current time allotment just doesn't make for it, except on Monday's when Kathy does home making. Then the allotment is three hours. Thus Monday is laundry day, unless I need something. Then I have to ask for help. HCA or otherwise.