On 13/12/2022 13:11, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist wrote:
On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 5:31 PM Alaric Snell-Pym via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote:I am fighting burnout right now. Work is rewarding, a lot of pressurehas been taken off me at home with the death of my mother-in-law (who we were looking after in her terminal decline, so the person she used to be was already gone a while previously)I have experienced this twice already, with my father and father in law. I expect to have to go through this at least twice more in the near future. I once remarked to a friend that this feels like the last rite of passage into "adulthood". It sucks, but is inevitable. So it goes. Hang in there.
Yeah. I could speak volumes about how society at large (here in the UK) fails to care for the elderly, with the expectation that they'll either have save enough money to pay for themselves to go into a nursing home - which is eyewateringly expensive so only really an option for the wealthy - or be looked after by family (while at the same time financial pressures meaning both parents in a family generally need to be working, childcare is already a strain for many, etc). Sure, there's social provision of elderly care *in theory*, but in practice, it's so overburdened - especially now with COVID having increased the number of people needing care, and reduced the population of healthy people being able to provide care, and brexit having cut off access to immigrant skilled labour... For my mother in law, she was stuck in hospital - because the hospital, despite being the most expensive-to-the-taxpayer care option, was the one place that couldn't get rid of her until there was proper care elsewhere. The hospital kept declaring her fit to come home (despite her very much not being), and we spent a lot of money having a downstairs bedroom built for her with ensuite bathroom as she wasn't able to get on and off the stairlift (which also cost a lot of money) any more, and tried to care for her at home when she was home - but she'd just end up going back to hospital, sooner and sooner each time. One time they discharged her, she turned up in a patient transport ambulance and they wheeled her into the house onto the first accessible chair (a dining chair in the living room) then left, taking their portable wheelchair with them... and as she couldn't walk (and she was too obese to carry or assist with walking) we couldn't get her to her bed or the toilet or anything; we could just about feed her and give her drinks, but because she'd had a stroke she couldn't talk clearly so she just sat there on the chair crying and wailing. We rang around the doctors and social services and community nurses, trying to find somebody to help; after a few hours she slid off the chair, so we had to call an ambulance to help lift her up; when they arrived (after several hours of her being on the floor) they took one look at her situation and said "Nope, she needs to be in hospital where there's specialist equipment and teams of trained staff to move her, what the hell do you mean they discharged her to you in this state?!" and so she went back in again, having had a very stressful day...
and with my youngest child now at a school she can walk to so I don't need to do school runsIn the US a statement like this would get you jailed, very likely. What a strange society that has evolved into.
Ha! Mary's eleven now, I would have walked with her to primary school if it was within walking distance (but it was a 20-25 minute drive away, so each school run took an hour, and with two of them per weekday, that was ten hours a week of my life I'm glad to have back) :-) But it's quite the expectation in the UK that secondary school (11+) kids will make their own way to school, maybe even on a public bus; kids whose parents bring them to the school gate will certainly be ridiculed by their peers! And miss out on the bonding experiences of going to the sweet shop with their friends on the way home!
Udhay
-- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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