Book Review: Trust Me, I’m a Care Worker by Chris Bulteel

Chris Bulteel‘s life has been somewhat exceptional. Alongside a career in catering that lasted 30 years, he also became Mayor of two different towns and gained the extremely rare accolade of Sheriff in one of them. But arguably most remarkable, is his career in the care sector, where through a great deal of hard work he reached a senior position before humbly retiring. He now lives in Dorset and writes, including his children’s fantasy book, Fogarty. The Book Network was fortunate enough to catch up with him for an interview about this book last year.

His latest release, Trust Me, I’m a Care Worker, is composed of journals recording his experience of working on the frontline of home-care for the elderly between 2004 and 2009. With only the names of patients and clients altered for confidentiality reasons, the journal entries provide a candid insight into the daily challenges and unpredictable difficulties of this vastly underappreciated line of work. As a care worker, Chris Bulteel was required to grasp not only the basics of caring for an elderly person with mobility issues, but also a learned understanding of a range of debilitating mental conditions such as dementia, alzheimer’s, memory loss, anxiety and depression… Not to mention the effects these ailments cause for the sufferers and their families.

As one can imagine, there is only so much preparation that can go into this type of job, regardless of the fact that Chris Bulteel eventually got promoted to perform routine health and safety checks in the homes of his clients. His book contains no shortage of stories describing just some of the turbulent, shocking, wonderful and hilarious nuances found across the minute-by-minute trails of a care worker's life on the road and in the home. For this reason alone, there is a reality to this book that matches the clarity of any dramatisation. And, as this review will make a note of the author’s extraordinary kindness more than once, it’s a given that Chris’ boundless dedication to his work makes the stories he tells ever more vivid and colourful.

The age, health and experience of Chris’ array of patients, many of whom have lived an extensive life of military and/or religious service, make for no shortage of character and personality in each of these stories. One or two of his patients may have been savoury, but the majority were sweet. In many, Chris even made a friend. Trust Me, I’m a Care Worker serves to highlight a particularly striking and memorable incident during his time with a client, meaning high drama, warmth of heart, and also the occasional laugh-out-loud anecdote, make up the bulk of his accounts. To name only a few, these include a highly eventful train ride, a dog with an unhealthy obsession with all things Winnie the Pooh, and the humorously catastrophic failure of a mechanical hoist during a power cut…

Through these stories and more, Chris Bulteel brings a real heart and soul to his journals. There is no judgement and no job too messy to be declined. He portrays his patients as challenging yet wonderful human beings whose life-stories, history and overall personalities are something to be treasured and adored. They are at the epicentre of his journal, and emphasise the caring nature of Chris’s work, and mental enrichment those in his profession can gather from making somebody’s day just that little bit brighter.

Trust me, I’m a Care Worker is arguably the ultimate documentation of life on the front-line of care work. Whilst having no reticence on describing how tough, relentless, exhausting and at times, unrewarding the job is, Chris Bulteel also enthusiastically depicts an occupation of devotion, sacrifice, love, humour, tolerance and most of all, life. He is a man whose kindness and dedication is effortlessly shown, not by any pompous self-proclamation, but through simple writing about his actions and emotional responses. As read through the experience of a man who went to every length conceivable to look after those in his charge with respect and dignity, Trust Me I’m a Care Worker oozes happiness and positivity when the same experiences in the hands of others may not. Chris' tales of the elderly in ill health and the vibrant company they provide, combined with attitude and heart of the man penning the journals gives the reader a unique and wonderful insight that tells of accounts so engaging, that perhaps an equally good title for the book could be, ‘Trust Me, This Really Happened…’

Also worthy of note and quite possibly the most important thing to mention is that the book opens and closes with a very personal shout out to all the care workers out there. Bulteel stresses that the care work sector is often overworked and underpaid, with staff being stretched to the brink of their physical and mental limits just to complete the rounds of their daily duties. Those willing to put themselves through this ordeal do so not out of financial merit (though they absolutely deserve as such), but through sheer love of their line of work. The UK’s economic recession in 2009 caused a ripple of financial desperation across its care sector and as documented in the book, Chris nobly accepted a redundancy package so that others in his profession could stay in work and continue to put food on the table for their own families.

It’s heartbreaking to remind ourselves that things have only gotten worse since, particularly during the past couple of years. Those in the profession of care worker, as well as those family members who have taken on the role out of sheer compassion, and not to mention the patients themselves, whose spirit and willpower often make the experience a joy in the darkest of hours, are now feeling a strain like never before. This encapsulates why books like Trust Me, I’m a Care Worker are so vital to highlight the sometimes thankless but relentlessly wondrous virtue of giving up the majority of one’s life in service of another’s, and how those curious to learn more can understand the unquantifiable sense of love and pride that people like Chris gain after a life of care towards those who need it the most.

You can order Trust Me, I’m a Care Worker in paperback and Kindle from Amazon and e-book from Kobo.