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....

  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...