Caregiver Related: What’s a Ratchet?

When I took on being a full time caregiver, I knew I was taking on full responsibility for skin care, elimination, nutrition, hygiene, assistance with activities of daily living and even physical therapy.  What I hadn’t counted on was taking on my husband’s role of maintenance mechanic for our home. Having a medical background, I’m comfortable with the caregiver duties; not so much with the mechanic ones.  In fact, they intimidate me to the point of panic when Lynn says something like he did last night, “Go get a ratchet.”

His electronic peddler (that he had been using almost non-stop for spasticity release for the past three years) recently bit the dust.  We had taped it up with duct tape, oiled all visible parts, and my solution, jiggled it unmercifully, with no success.  Resuscitation attempts of the old one was “called” and we had to pull out our backup peddler.  Unfortunately, when we turned on the backup, this terrible grinding noise could be heard with every rotation.  Since the grinding seemed to be coming from the motor, Lynn’s recommendation was to order a new one and return the noisy one when it came in.  So I did.  Well, the new one isn’t noisy but it has a hitch in its giddy-up.  Every rotation now is accompanied with a shimmy jump that can be felt in the base of Lynn’s foot and all the way up the leg. Upon watching the action for a period of time, he made the pronouncement, “I don’t think the arm is tight enough.  You need to tighten up the bolt. Go get the ratchet.”

Hearing the, “Go get…” was like a Pavlovian response for me.  My skin became clammy; I developed tunnel vision; and the muscles in my head and neck tightened.  It happened to be raining yesterday so my arthritic hands were already screaming with every use. “Wait a minute.  I can’t tighten anything today,” I responded. “My hands hurt, too, much.”

“It will be okay. The ratchet will do all the work.”

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