We put pressure mats in the corridor outside the rooms of residents who wander, so the night staff know when somebody is up. The mat outside twelve logs steps every night at three. Slow, uneven, with the two small pauses a person makes with a walking frame. The gentleman in twelve has been in bed for two years and cannot stand. His frame is in the store room. The mat hears it.
I am a night carer at a residential home and the mats are the reason I can sit down.
The mats.
Thin pressure mats on the corridor floor outside the rooms of residents who get up at night and should not be on their own. Step on one and the pager goes, and a log records the pattern of the pressure, because the makers thought it would be useful for the physios, and it is. You can tell a shuffle from a stride. You can tell a frame.
The mat outside twelve logs a walker every night at three.
The pattern.
Slow. A step, a pause, a step, with the two small points of pressure before each step that are the feet of a frame being set down. Left foot weaker than right. It goes from the door of twelve along the corridor towards the lounge, about eight metres, which is the edge of the mat, and stops, and about twenty minutes later it comes back the other way, to the door of twelve, and stops.
The gentleman in twelve has not stood for two years. He had a stroke and then another and he is cared for in bed, and he is comfortable, and he is not walking anywhere, and I have been in his room at three with the pager going and he has been asleep with his mouth open and the mat in the corridor has been logging him at the lounge end.
His frame is in the store room. I put it there myself. It is a frame with a left leg that is worn more than the right, because he leaned on it.
What has been checked.
The mat. Replaced. It logs the walk.
The corridor, by me, at three, sitting in the chair at the lounge end that I sit in. The pager goes. Nobody is in the corridor. The mat is a strip of grey rubber on the carpet and it is empty and the log on my phone is drawing the steps, the pause, the frame, coming towards me, and at about eight metres it stops, at the edge of the mat, at the chair, at me, and I have sat there with it stopped in front of me and the corridor empty for twenty minutes, and then it goes back.
What I have done.
I got his frame out of the store room. I put it outside his door, where it used to stand, at night, when he could use it.
The log changed. The two points of pressure before each step were gone. The steps were there, slow, the weak left, but the frame was not on the mat any more, because the frame was not on the mat any more: it was in his hand. In the morning the frame was at the lounge end of the corridor, by my chair, and not outside his door where I had left it.
I put it back. Every night now it is by the chair in the morning.
Who.
I think it is him. I do not mean that something has happened to him. He is in his bed and his chest goes up and down and the doctor saw him on Tuesday and is pleased with him. I mean that the part of him that walked to the lounge at three every night for the years before the strokes, the part that got up because the nights were long and went to where the light was, is still doing it, and that the man in the bed is the man who cannot, and the man on the mat is the man who could, and they are not talking to each other.
What is done about it.
The mat outside twelve is on the night log every night as a false activation and the manager has asked me to turn it off, and I have not, because it is not false.
What I do.
I work nights.
I used to sit in the chair at the lounge end with a book. I still sit there. But at three, when the pager goes and the steps start, I put the book down and I look up the corridor the way you look up when somebody you know is coming, and when the log says he has got to the edge of the mat I say, evening, the way I used to, before, when he would get as far as the chair and stand there with the frame and say, can't sleep, and I would say, no, me neither, and he would stand a minute and go back.
I say, can't sleep. And I leave the pause. And I say, no, me neither.
He goes back after twenty minutes, the way he did. And in the morning the frame is by the chair, and I put it outside his door, and I go in and say good morning to the man in the bed, and he looks at me the way he does now, and last Thursday, for the first time in two years, he said something, and what he said was, me neither.