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...

  It's been a while since I added to this blog. I’d like to write more often, but being a carer has its challenges - your priority has to be those you care for. Since my last update I’ve had extra caring work come my way; my mother moved into a care home in September, and I’ve been busy getting her settled in, and helping with some of her financial and administration work.  I’ve also been involved in my late stepmother's estate, and these new challenges have made me consider the contrasting attitudes that different generations seem to have, and to contemplate how these differences have arisen, and whether modern attitudes actually represent an improvement on those in the past.   *** My father didn’t talk much about  the war. Like many of his generation, he witnessed some pretty horrible things - I know he saw burning enemy tanks with German soldiers stuck inside ( 1) , and he was also involved in the clean-up at Belsen. I do, however, remember him saying, on mor...

  (Written in October 2022) In the 1990s I worked for a software company, which was based in the US. I worked out of Maidenhead, supporting customers in the UK, Scandinavia, Ireland, and, for some products, other parts of Europe. Having a bit of german on my CV, I was first in line when our colleagues in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, needed a bit of help. The guy I dealt with there wasn’t actually German, er war Ungar - Hungarian. He spoke good english, and we had a few chats on social matters - one of which, of course, was the amount of change he had seen in the preceding decade - he’d been living in Hungary, under Communist rule, for all his life before moving to Germany in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One thing he spoke about at length was the way the Communist authorities lied to the people. ‘The shelves were empty, everywhere there were queues, but the people were told that our system was world-beating, that it was better than anything in the west’, he would say. Soun...

‘ 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....

  It has been recorded that Prof. Neil Furguson thought, in March 2020, that lockdowns could not be imposed on the British people. Yet they were. Our leaders, and their advisers, were surprisingly quickly convinced of the need for this, and then thought there would be significant pushback, justifying a policy of behavioural management, nudge and coercion that, prior to 2020, would have been considered very un-British (Laura Dodsworh’s excellent book, ‘ A State of Fear ’ is worth reading, if you haven’t already.) . How might this have arisen? Were all government ministers fully aware of what was going on, had they thought everything through and considered the risks, I wonder, or were their faculties somehow impaired? *** I’ve written before on the topic of the side effects of prescription medication ( ref 1 , ref 2 ).  It's not unknown for people to mess things up, we all do something less well than we might wish sometimes. There will often be a reason for what happens; in some...