THE GATE

We used two have two gates - until one got stolen one Saturday night when we were all in and Son still up with his mates.

That aside, Missus' OCD means that she's terrified of leaving the other one (now secured with a heavy-duty chain) open. At least with one gate missing she'll now just walk all the way round to the other entrance. In the morning when I see her off, I of course have to walk with her to the gate to close it again (and further if the cat's out - see "Stupid Cat" post).

SORT THEM TABLETS

With the vast array of medications and supplements Missus is now on, left to herself she'd scramble through one big paper bag to find the right ones for the morning or evening dose. I therefore with each fresh prescription she brings home, I sort them for her into a large number of paper bags, each one with one type of tablet and dose, because individual tablets aren't the right number of milligrams. She may need to take a 5 milligram tablet and a 10 milligram to get the correct 15 milligram dose for example.

This means there's a vast assortment of paper bags on her side of the bed, but she takes everything at the right dose at the right time. She does this because she knows our marriage counts on it. In this way I am fortunate. Many delusional people simply don't take their medication and get in a cycle of being sectioned and released. 

THE NEWS

Apart from Saturday Kitchen and Miranda Hart, she only ever wants to watch BBC News 24. If however a bulletin is on BBC1, that's more important news so she'll switch over to watch BBC1 news instead - even though it's the same news programme. She'll watch the same stories loop round and round all day, but if you were to ask her what was on the news, she couldn't remember any of it. What's really going on is just more OCD, a compulsion to keep informed, even though she is actually informed about nothing.

INSPECTING THRESHOLDS

Her condition is complicated with OCD, which means that she feels she needs to do stuff when she doesn't. She has had a longstanding obsession with taps being off, and multiple inspections of the handbag to ensure everything's in there, but has recently developed one for carefully examining the floor of doorways before walking through them.

My training regarding OCD is to simply not allow these behaviours. When she does them I tell her off. In this way she gets reassured that nothing bad will happen. Unfortunately it doesn't "stick" and she would revert to severe OCD if I wasn't constantly on top of her irrational fears.