A ceiling hoist lifts a person who cannot move themselves, and it logs every lift with the weight, because the weight is how you know the sling is on right. The hoist in room four logs a lift at two and a lift at four, every night. Ninety kilos. The sling hangs empty. The room has had a different resident in it for a year, a lady who weighs fifty, and who sleeps through, and who says in the morning that she was turned.
I am a night carer at a nursing home and I have turned a lot of people at two and four in the morning, which is how you stop a pressure sore, and the hoist in room four does it without me.
The hoist.
A track on the ceiling. A motor on the track. A sling under the person, clipped to a bar on the motor, and the motor lifts and moves them, and logs the weight it lifts, because a sling that is on wrong gives a wrong weight and a wrong weight is how you find out before the person does.
The hoist in four logs a lift at two and a lift at four, ninety kilos each, every night, and the sling is on its hook on the wall.
The lady in four.
She has been in the room a year. Fifty kilos. She can turn herself, mostly, and when she cannot we help, by hand, because she does not need the hoist and has never been in it. She sleeps through. In the morning she says she slept well. She says, some mornings, that the night girls turned her, gently, at two and at four, and that they did not say anything, and that she did not mind.
Nobody turned her. I am the night girls.
What has been checked.
The hoist. Serviced. It logs the lifts.
The room, by me, at two. The motor on the track moves. It goes from its park position to over the bed, which is what it does when somebody presses the handset, and the handset is on its hook. It lowers the bar, to the height it lowers to for a sling on a person lying down. It stops. It lifts. The log reads ninety kilos. The bar rises with nothing on it, and the motor moves along the track the half metre it moves to turn somebody, and lowers, and releases, and goes back to park.
The lady, in the bed, under the bar, asleep, turns. On her own. From her left side to her right, at the moment the hoist releases, the way a person turns when they have been lifted and set down facing the other way.
Who.
The gentleman in four before her. Ninety kilos, give or take, a big man who had been a big man all his life and was proud of it and who could not move at the end and hated it, and who was turned at two and four for three years by the hoist and by us, and who used to say, at two, when the motor started, here we go, and at four, when it started again, nearly morning.
He died in the room in the March, at about three, between the turns.
What is done about it.
The lifts are on the hoist log and the log goes to the manufacturer, who services on cycles, and the hoist in four will be serviced twice as often as the others, and the manager has signed off the cost, and has asked me what is being lifted, and I have told her, and she has asked me not to put it in the handover.
What I do.
I work nights.
I go in at two. I stand by the bed. When the motor starts I say, here we go, because that is what was said in that room at two for three years and I do not see why the room should stop hearing it. The bar lowers. The weight lifts. The lady turns. And at four I go in and stand by the bed and when the motor starts I say, nearly morning, and the bar lowers, and she turns, and she sleeps.
The lady asked me last week who the man was. I had not mentioned a man. She said, the one who says here we go. She said he was very polite and he did not like being lifted and he was glad it was somebody else's turn, and that he had told her that, at two, and I have stopped saying here we go, because it seems somebody has it covered, and I stand by the bed and I listen, and I have heard it, once, in a voice that is not mine, and I am not frightened of it, and I think that is the right way to feel about a man who is still making sure a stranger does not get a sore.