What I've learned this week...

My Mum and Covid-19

Like most people I know, I have several older people to think about during this crisis.  The elderly are advised to completely self-isolate, not leaving their houses (or at a stretch their gardens) at all for several months.  This seems like sensible advice.  If they stay in their homes, the chances are they won’t catch Covid-19 and won’t therefore have, at best, to face the symptoms of an illness that by all accounts tends to be more extreme in older people, and, at worst, to risk their lives.  Friends, family, neighbours or volunteers can do their shopping and leave food outside their doors so that they don’t have any physical contact. Indoors, they have TV, the radio, the telephone – many even have computers, though many are like my mum and believe the Lenovo in their spare bedroom will empty their bank account, hack into their medical records and read their private thoughts if they actually turn it on, because Doris across the road says they do that, you know, if you’re not ‘careful’.  They are in many ways better placed to cope with enforced isolation than younger people, as many elderly people live very isolated lives anyway, sadly.

However, what this very sensible policy fails to take into consideration is what elderly people are actually like.  Unlike other vulnerable groups, such as those who are very ill with cancer or other life-threatening conditions, these days many elderly people, even those over eighty, are very fit, healthy and energetic. And unlike people in younger generations, they no longer care what people think of them and they are often what can only be termed bloody-minded.

          My own mum is in her late seventies. An ex-ward sister in a busy District General hospital, a woman who by all accounts was highly respected before she retired (aged 72!), and who has a degree in Social Sciences, she nevertheless has some odd beliefs about medicine.  For example, she believes that antibiotics kill viruses and she doesn’t really believe, deep down in her bones, that there is a shortage of effective antibiotics or that we are over-using them.  If she got her way, people would be prescribed antibiotics for everything from the common cold to a slipped disc.  She sees them as a cure-all.  Yes, logically, when tackled on the subject, she admits that she can understand about the antiobiotic crisis, but dig only a little deeper and she’ll end up complaining that GPs won’t give you antibiotics, presumably implying that they are stockpiling them for themselves and their friends.

Needless to say, she is not enjoying the self-isolation.  Under normal circumstances, though she spends a lot of time on her own, as we are a small family and most of us work, she does look after her great-grandson on a regular basis, she goes to ‘town’ on the bus once a week for her shopping, and she goes for (incredibly slow) walks several times a week.  She has an artificial hip but that isn’t why she walks more slowly than an exhausted tortoise: she has always walked very, very, very slowly.  It is a kind of hobby: it’s a pity there isn’t a Slow Walking Society she could join. But she’d never get to the meetings on time. 

Obviously, she can (or certainly she used to be able to) walk fast if she chose to.  Presumably, as a nurse, she had to zoom round the wards with brisk speed and efficiency – in fact, on one memorable occasion when I lived in London, we got a call to say she had walked so fast at work that she’d walked straight into an external brick wall and caused herself enough damage to keep her at home for some time.  So, maybe, her slow walk is just a reaction against the apparent danger of the constant speed required of her during working hours.  But I remember as a child finding it excruciating that it took us about an hour and a half to walk to the next village, a journey that would take a short fat man in his sixties, with a blister and a sprained ankle, carrying several bags of shopping and with a gale force wind in his face, about half an hour. My sister and I used to talk wistfully of buying her a skateboard or having her fitted with casters.

 

Needless to say, her ‘bionic hip’, as my partner calls it, is not making her any faster. A morning constitutional can end up taking up the bulk of her daylight hours, which is fine under normal circumstances but in the current crisis she might end up being wiped down with a Flash cloth by an over-officious Police Officer in case anyone inadvertently leaned on her, assuming she was an ornamental gatepost. 

And elderly folk don’t like ‘being a burden’, do they?  Two days ago, my mum was contemplating walking to her local pharmacy to collect her prescription. The pharmacy is about a mile away, but, in addition to the fact that it would be an eight-hour round trip for her, she is supposed to be staying at home to avoid catching the virus. She hasn’t quite grasped yet that a ten-day course of Erithromycin isn’t going to hack it with C19. My twenty-eight year old niece, who is an RSPCA Officer but is only covering emergencies during the crisis, would be happy to collect her prescription, but mum doesn’t feel she can ask her.

               ‘I’ve never asked anybody for help in the past and I don’t want to start now,’ she muttered on the phone. I don’t agree with this idea myself.  I think that people helping each other is what raises humans higher than the cretinous yobs I read about on Huff News who’ve been spitting at council employees and jeering at NHS staff. Those morlocks don’t deserve to be helped, but people like my mum, a woman who has given most of her adult life to helping the elderly through her job as a nurse, should not feel uncomfortable about accepting some help from her family. Accepting help with grace is as great a skill as giving it.

              

[To be continued…]