Thoughts of a carer

  It’s affecting my mental health! I wrote a few weeks ago about the effects that caring for Viv has had on my mental health. One of the biggest problems is dealing with the huge behemoth that is our National Health Service; people who have few interactions with it may find it easy, but Viv has a medical record file that stands six feet tall or more, and that causes problems. + + +  I had one of my breakdowns this morning. About 8am I ran around the house, screaming; banged my head as hard as I could against the downstairs loo door; ran out into the garden, even though I was only wearing nightclothes at the time, swearing at the top of my voice (and it's a cold, grey December day) December, and then ended up sat on the stairs, weeping.  The cause of this drama? Viv had mentioned that her hearing in her left ear was worsening. She’s totally deaf in her right ear, due to a tumour, and it was loss of hearing that first identified that, back in 2014. The saga we have had sinc...

  Introduction Prior to March 2017 I would walk the footpaths, pavements and other routes around my home town, and elsewhere, without thinking that there was any kind of problem with them. If there was an obstruction, I’d walk around it. It took a major ‘life event’ for me to see things differently. It was in that year that my partner, Viv, was struck down by a mystery neurological condition, one symptom of which was that she was unable to balance or control her legs. Following a spell in hospital she was discharged, and, after some rehab, by June that year we were equipped with a wheelchair; I could take her out to enjoy some aspects of everyday life that we both had previously taken for granted: the fresh air, shopping, going to friends’ houses, even the odd trip away, with the wheelchair folded up and fitting well in the boot of our small hatchback car. Prior to receiving the wheelchair, my only experience of ‘pushing’ another human in a wheeled conveyance had been some twenty-f...

I don't know how often you visit your GP surgery. I go every couple of weeks, to drop off a prescription or somesuch. I've been registered at five surgeries in the last dozen or so years, and the walls and windows at each seem to have been peppered somewhat randomly with signs. Most are badly produced on a PC, and fixed up with Blu-tack. The spelling, grammar and design of these is uniformly awful.  Yesterday I visited our surgery and noticed a sign that I hadn't seen before, although my partner of those dozen years said has been there for some time: Most people probably don't notice anything special about this. But why? I've read that the NHS costs the country three grand for each of us, every man, woman and child. Surely to God, for that we are entitled to expect the staff employed there to know the difference between 'assistance' and 'assisted'.   Worse still, some manager (of whom there are plenty in the NHS) will have sanctioned the spend of, pe...

On 18 April I posted an entry on this blog reporting how I felt that the needs of the elderly, disabled and infirm are not considered properly by government, and, perhaps as a consequence, by society at large. Three more examples have become apparent since I wrote that post. Councils allowing pavement obstructions  The Hertfordshire Mercury has a story  about the problems faced by a blind woman now that councils have allowed cafes and pubs to put customer seating on some of the pavement space in our town centres.  This has the effect of narrowing the available space for passers by, at a time when we are being told by government to keep two metres away from strangers.  The lady concerned has a similar opinion to mine of our PM: “I wish Boris Johnson could meet some visually impaired people so we could explain how difficult it is for us at the moment.  Sadly we seem to be ignored and don’t have a voice loud enough for people to hear our daily struggles." I have co...

The problem of innumeracy today  In some ways I was lucky. I may have had what today's generation might think to be a ghastly childhood, but I did get some opportunities that seem rare today. One is in education: the chance to learn mathematics and science from teachers who actually understood their subjects. The above may sound bitter, it may sound like a swipe at modern schools. Maybe it is, but I have helped two youngsters - one my own son, another the daughter of a friend - with their maths one thing they told me was that their teachers did not seem to know what they were talking about. (In my son's case, it was post-GCSE, at the start of A-level, when he was being taught the basics of calculus - differentiation and integration. He didn't get it. He asked the teacher to explain, who couldn't, at least not so that my son could understand. In fact, the teacher's stock answer to most queries seemed to be 'look it up on the internet'. (Maybe that invention, ...