Let’s cherish NHS and social care.. our lights in darkness
The devastation of failing sight is dimmed by the dedication of medical staff and council workers helping families in need
I felt utterly grateful for the life-saving gift immigration has brought this country ANNIE BROWN ON EXPERT MEDICAL ASSISTANCE
I felt my mum and I were alone, both groping in a dark of different sorts ANNIE BROWN ON LOOKING FOR HELP FOR MUM
A WEEK ago, my mother became totally blind, as if a curtain had draped across her only seeing eye, closing in impenetrable darkness.
She has age-related macular degeneration, a condition which, over the years, bores through the central vision, hollowing out all but the edges of sight.
Nearly 1.5million people in the UK have some form of macular disease.
For years now, she has coped with only a fraction of peripheral vision in her left eye, just enough to navigate her home, make out the blurred shapes on the TV and to live a comfortable life.
It was enough to give me freedom too, to work, to have a life, to limit to perhaps a couple of times a week the 70-mile round trip to deliver shopping.
The simple things like being able to use a phone maintained daily contact and the plates kept spinning.
Twice a day, North Ayrshire Council sends in a carer, women whose kindness and patience appear limitless, who make breakfast and dinner and leave delectable sandwiches and cakes for lunch.
On Wednesday, the balance tipped, the plates crashed dramatically when my mum woke completely blind and it seemed macular disease had been the cruellest of thieves in the night.
She was terrified and there I was, a journalist of three decades, who has covered wars, tackled government ministers, investigated and closed down dodgy care homes and fraudulent companies, and I was utterly powerless.
As I drove to her home, I called the social services duty care worker and was told it could take weeks for an assessment for extra care.
I called for help from occupational therapy and the sensory impairment team and again was told it could take weeks, all of which compounded my despair.
I felt my mum and I were alone, both groping in a dark of different sorts, unable to get help from a local council which is too underfunded to cope with demand.
Next, I called the secretary of my mother’s ophthalmologist and within an hour she had called back to say he would squeeze us in on Thursday.
Just getting her there, up the steps to the gate, into a car, felt Herculean and we almost gave up, convinced there was nothing the doctor could do anyway.
I thought of the children in this country, caring for parents who are sick and blind and how they cope but shouldn’t have to. But at Ayr hospital, there he was, one of the world’s leading ophthalmologists, looking into my mum’s eyes, as he has done for years now, and I was so grateful to at least have someone who genuinely cared and who I knew would move mountains if he thought he could help. I had to leave the room, I couldn’t stop crying, I felt interned by fear until a nurse working through an oversubscribed, frenetic clinic took me aside and soothed me back to sanity. Then the ophthalmologist told me that perhaps he could help, that there had been a bleed in my mother’s eye, which had swamped her fraction of sight and that an operation could perhaps clear it.
The tears came again, this time from hope.
Miraculously, the eye surgeon slotted her in for Friday morning and, not for the first time, I felt utterly grateful for the life-saving gift immigration has brought to this country, given these incredible doctors are both of Asian origin.
In the weeks leading to this crisis, I had been covering the election and one candidate had impressed me – her name was Amy Callaghan.
Amy was trying to unseat Jo Swinson – Lib Dem by party, Tory by action – who abstained rather than vote in favour of Labour’s motion to safeguard the NHS from being sold off to US corporations in a Boris Johnson-Donald Trump trade deal.
Amy, 27, credits the health service with saving her life after she was diagnosed with skin cancer when she was a teenager. Protecting the NHS is the cornerstone of her political ambitions. In this moment, I can’t conceive of a more laudable cause.
That Thursday night, when I should have been covering Amy’s count, my mum and I listened to the election coverage and at 4am, this idealistic, energetic young woman, pushed the ejector button on the pro-Trident Nukey Jo.
Amy and her party colleagues will try to fight the Tory disease, now set to spread further misery across Britain, but it seems now our only hope is for independence to protect us from gangrenous Conservative rule.
Light has started to filter through to my mum’s eye and it carries the hope that in weeks, that tiny, monumental, part of her sight may return.
Free personal care for older people is one of the landmark achievements of devolution and nearly 78,000 people over the age of 65 benefit from it in Scotland.
In North Ayrshire Council, a team of nurses, carers and specialists are keeping the equivalent of four hospital wards of patients living in their own homes in the community, not to mention the positive impact they are having on the lives of relatives like me.
This week the Audit Commission found local authorities are being forced to take cash from their reserves to combat a Scottish Government funding drop of 7.6 per cent in real terms and more cash is desperately needed to save a sinking NHS.
Our NHS and social care are the lifeboats when we are drowning and the SNP must be better guardians if the staff firefighting on the ground are to deliver the services which are so transformative.
I have now had a visit from an intermediate care team and the home care team are trying to get me an extra care visit a day but they simply don’t have the staff and resources to meet demand, so we’re paying for extra private care and I’m taking time off work.
I am just hopeful that, eventually, thanks to the precious NHS and social care, we will somehow see our way through.