Thoughts of a carer

In my previous blog entry , I described my experiences of the effect that certain medication - in that case, antidepressants - can have on someone’s judgement and character, and the effect on their relationships and even those around them. I also referred to an NHS report from 2016 that contained some startling facts, including: ‘ 48%, of adults had taken at least one prescribed medicine in the last week, and almost a quarter, 24%, had taken three or more’   ‘...commonly  used  prescribed  medicines were antihypertensives (by  15%  of  adults) and  lipid-lowering  medicines (14%);  followed  by  proton-pump  inhibitors  for reducing  acid  in the  stomach  (11%); analgesics and  non-steroidal anti-inflammatory  drugs (11%); and antidepressants  (10%)’ The idea that ten percent of the population could be taking something to cause them to behave in the way my ex wife did should shock...

One of the (many) things my ex wife used to criticise me about was that I was sceptical about, well, almost everything. Ever since I was a child I have been wary of believing what others tell me; there are dark episodes in my past that may at least partly explain that. The fact is, I do have an ‘enquiring mind’. I don't like being told something, and then being told to believe it ‘because I say so’. I’m awkward; I’m probably somewhat ‘on the spectrum’; but I believe that I should be able to understand almost anything, if the person I’m listening to can communicate effectively, and that I should also be able to satisfy myself that what they are saying is, in fact, correct. If they can't, and I can't, I won't trust them. I’ve therefore earned a reputation for being sceptical on, among other matters, medical topics. Some may think that I’ve developed this attitude only in response to events in the last ten years or so, but that’s not the case at all: I have had my concern...

  My stepmother passed away last summer; my father had died some fifteen years before. They were both a good age, he made it to 81, she to 89. They’d had a good retirement in their bungalow together, travelling around Europe quite widely, enjoying a good standard of living funded by their pensions which, including their state pensions, were perhaps providing them with combined income of around £40K. I didn’t know details of their income, or outgoings, when they were alive. People don’t talk about money; many, I believe, don’t even think about it in quite the way they should. *** Viv and I have a number of spreadsheets which document our possible finances in a number of differing scenarios. We know what our pension can pay for now; we also, perhaps, are lucky that we don’t have to buy annuities to use them, and can plan to have the amounts of money that we might need at a time in our lives that we might need it. One of the scenarios we’ve considered is that I die in my seventies, le...