The Invisible Women

I know you can’t cure me; but please, dear health care professional, acknowledge my existence, as a PERSON.

 

How it feels to be an octogenarian and ill.

 

Its been a bit of a week, my mums been ill, well more ill than she was last week and from an armchair devourer of ‘medi blog’s’ I’ve found myself on the ‘shop floor’

Mum and I have danced a bit of a dance, we have waltzed around the emotional mine field that is role reversal of parent and child, I now the carer speaking out for mum who is to weary to do it for herself any more, when once she did this for me.

It has I have to say all left me feeling a little brittle. I shall post more about this when

A, I have made the post look less like ‘War and Peace’ than it does now and,

B, I have tempered my emotions on the matter into something that makes the words on the page look less like a ‘vomit splat’ than they currently do.

Last night I read Trauma Queens post, ‘Don’t Spare the Horses,’ a beautifully crafted post; poetry, it must be to do with the air and landscape of Scotland. I think there are striking similarities between his writing and that of fellow Scot, the poet Robin Robertson.

The post struck a chord for me because I am now seeing (what mum has been telling me for years) that to many HCP’s but not thankfully all, old people become invisible.

It wasn’t that mum didn’t receive appropriate medical care (apart from my spat with the Dr’s surgery over the fact she couldn’t have a home visit.) It was just that she became no more than a stack of measurements, x-rays, blood tests and ECG’s she was no more than a bun on the production line at ‘Mr Kiplings’, waiting for the cherry and a box. (And yes I know what sort of box your thinking of.)

My mum is no fool she knows this is as good as it gets, there will be no return to rude health, and she knows that immortality is not available on the NHS. She said to me, commenting on the fact she was offered neither food nor hot drink (bad move arriving at the medical admission unit at 5pm and the ward at 10pm) ‘People used to go into nursing because they cared about others; it’s not like that any more.’

I personally don’t think that is the case, but she could certainly be forgiven for thinking so; the overwhelming ‘vibe’ of our hospital experience is that by being ill, she was a nuisance, that just had to be moved on to the next stage of the process. A bit of eye contact, a ‘how are you feeling now’ a squeeze of the hand, (this is where the ambulance personnel score the extra brownie points and Blue Peter badges, because they did this as instinctively as breathing; but then, I suppose, in general they only have one patient at a time.) these simple things would have made her feel so much better, but not only that, it would have proved to her she was indeed still visible.