Thoughts of a carer

‘ 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....

I've just come off the phone after a regular chat with my mum. She's 88, living in a tiny bungalow in what was once a development of sheltered accomodation in South Cambridgeshire. (I say 'what was once' because, some years after she moved in, the council gave up on the 'sheltered' idea, just giving the residents a phone number to phone if they needed anything, and once-a-week visits from a council officer.) My mum was quite mobile in January 2020, but, as our leaders gradually put the fear of God into people, she stayed indoors in her tiny home from March that year. 'Use it or lose it' is the phrase my osteopath uses with regards to muscle strength, and, by February 2021, my mum was hospitalised due to her legs not working. She then spent maybe ten days in Addenbrookes followed by a couple of weeks in a rehab unit, where they were apparently much in demand due to the numbers of old people who'd stopped walking during the lockdown. By March my mum wa...

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, ...

When my mum was in her mid sixties she moved to a small bungalow. My father and stepmother did also at around the same time. My mothers parent's moved to a bungalow when they were around 60. My sister moved to a bungalow before she was fifty. One of the reasons they chose single-storey living was that 'you don't want stairs when you get older'. I'm over sixty now, and I've helped Viv cope with stairs when she was in a wheelchair. I'm not convinced that single-storey living is necessarily a good thing for the older person. + + +  Let me give another example. Viv's Aunty Irene is ninety, and lives alone in a two-bedroom (two-storey) house. There is only one loo, upstairs. Her bedroom is upstairs, she spends most of the day downstairs but goes upstairs when nature calls; she goes up (and down) the flight of stairs perhaps five times a day.  Compared to my mum and stepmum, who are both a couple of years younger, she is far fitter. She can still walk around t...