Thoughts of a carer

  I received a text the day before yesterday. ‘This is your NHS GP Surgery. Please log on to our website and submit a current blood pressure reading. If you do not have a blood pressure monitor please contact the surgery.’ Around five years ago I discussed my blood pressure with a GP: we agreed that I would monitor it at home, and, if it was significantly over 140/90 - say, in the 160s - I would get back to them, but otherwise I did not need to do anything about my blood pressure. All of a sudden, and without my agreement, the NHS is hassling me for blood pressure readings. WHY? Of course, receiving this text has had an effect on me, and my blood pressure is through the roof - 166 / 114 yesterday. There’s no better way of inducing stress in someone than a medical authority saying to them ‘excuse me, I think we need to keep more of an eye on you than we had previously agreed, and you MUST submit some information to us.’  *** Viv had a similar one yesterday. At the very bottom o...

‘ You must stay at home’ - Rt. Hon. Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 23 March 2020. To paraphrase his hero, never in the field of human endeavour has a Prime Minister spoken five so poorly considered words that would impact so many. It's not as if likely problems with this approach were unknown: in January 2017, Dr. Amit Arora wrote a blog note on the topic of ‘Deconditioning Awareness’ for the NHS England website, of which the ‘experts’ advising the PM must surely have been aware: ‘Time to move: Get up, get dressed, keep moving’; it explains, in layman’s terms, why restricting the mobility of the elderly is a bad idea.   *** The NHS is at breaking point: that we know. The reasons given are many and varied, but the underlying cause is that old chestnut, bed-blocking. Patients, many elderly and vulnerable, cannot be discharged home without full engagement of necessary social care support. This takes time; during that time said patient takes up a hospital bed....

  When I’m asked about my occupation these days, I reply ‘carer’. It is often written that caring has a big impact on an individual’s life, and, indeed, their freedom; I can only go by my experience. Caring has completely changed my life. In this essay I shall try to explain how.  I’ve actually had three phases of caring: pre-critical illness, during critical illness, and post-critical illness. Viv’s ‘during’ phase lasted fifteen months, after which she began a slow recovery; the effects on me of what happened in that time will last much longer. In an attempt to relate the effect of caring to that of another challenge I’ve experienced, I’d like to go back fifty years. Daily life and freedoms as a Bluecoat boy, 1971 In 1970 I was admitted to Christ’s Hospital , the Bluecoat school. I’ve seldom claimed to have enjoyed the six years I spent there; it should have been seven but I persuaded my parents to agree to me leaving at seventeen, rather than study further to attempt to get ...