Libertarian economists suggest the reason recovery was slow following the banking induced debt crisis is because we didn’t cut deeply enough into public spending. We needed to make the poor suffer much more to make them increase their productivity and drag the whole country out of the huge debts they had created by being lazy scroungers living off the success of our hard working, risk taking bankers. Enough voters believed this to elect the coalition to punish the scroungers and freeloaders with a policy of austerity. It now looks to many like Osborne’s persistence with austerity has been vindicated, our economy is finally bouncing back on a new wave of zero hours non-unemployment and property price inflation debt being lapped up by the industrious South East. Even though ordinary families remain significantly worse off than before the debt crisis began, we’ve never had it so good. Again.
Back in the mid-nineties the Premier League was invented, according to the FA, to make English football more competitive. Instead it concentrated resources in the hands of a small number of top flight clubs who took all the extra cash and invested it overseas, much like tory tax evaders have done for the last thirty years. After several decades of this experiment it has become very clear that it isn’t delivering the (declared) intended outcome. The same arguments used by the libertarian economists are being used about our national game. We are being told that the Premier League project didn’t go far enough in the first place and we should now give the super rich elite full access to, and ultimately ownership of, the scraps that the 100 or so other professional football clubs have been sharing. The FA will achieve this by inserting 10 Premier League under 21 teams into the lower reaches of the professional pyramid, creating a whole raft of uncompetitive, unsupported matches, half a season of pre-season friendlies that will destroy many of the clubs it is inflicted upon. In subsequent years the damage will be moved higher up the pyramid as extra B teams come in and all move towards the current league 1 where they will form an impermeable barrier between the Championship and lower leagues, removing opportunity and incentive from the teams trapped below them.
The FA must believe that in a way similar to Osborne’s claims for austerity, that the grassroots will try harder to somehow nurture and develop the talent so obviously missing from the English game at the top level. It clearly won’t come from the youngsters currently in these Premier League B teams, who are in large part the Pogbas and Januzajs, kids from all over the world headhunted as young teenagers and financially enticed to London or Manchester with their families, maybe now eligible for England through residency but who rarely take it up because they see how we treat our players in the media. So the “competitive” football they need to move on to the next level is as likely to benefit other European nations as it is the England team.
This scheme will do nothing to address the real problem of failing to teach and develop skills in enough of our own 5-10 year olds so they are good enough for the elite academies as teenagers. In fact by introducing a raft of poorly supported teams and ultimately uncompetitive games into the lower levels of the professional game we will reduce interest in the clubs that currently provide what little support to early skills there is for kids in the bulk of the country; this is a policy that will make grassroots football whither and die, and with that talent spotting and player development at an age where it can make a difference will cease away from accessible elite academies of the Premier League. What should be happening is getting properly qualified coaches into infant schools where they can teach all the kids at a young age the necessary skills and teamwork. And then encouraging them to join subsidised schemes for pre-teens with professional qualified coaches attached to their local clubs. We need to reach many more kids at a younger age and avoid discouraging them for the myriad of reasons they are currently discouraged. It needs to be the FA investing in the future for English football rather than clubs investing in a very narrow self interest.
In the meantime I expect we will be offered special, more affordable, access to Sky Sports packages. Designed to convince all the poor suckers who used to watch live football actually live, to jump into the ultimately unaffordable football on TV bubble and be grateful of the opportunity to have been fleeced by the super rich.
I’m horrified by what the coalition is in the process of doing to the NHS and I intend to do something about it.
Reforms fleetingly mentioned in the pre-election manifesto, but backed by the Liberal Democrats as part of the coalition agreement so they could chase electoral reform. Barely a murmur raised in the media during their rapid progress through Parliament, even the BBC failed to warn us what was happening; of course now we know they have form.
Even though it isn’t supported by the electorate the privatisation is now picking up pace, there is money to be made. The business interests supporting the policy and the Tory Party, need to reach the point of no return to the principled healthcare of the founding fathers. Is there anything we can do about the ongoing destruction of the NHS, what do we really want from the phoenix that will hopefully rise from the ashes in 3 years, and is there any group we can trust to deliver?
I’m pinning my hopes on the new National Health Action party, which is being officially launched in November. Hopefully it will force all the major parties to address the issues raised by this botched fund-raising exercise for the Tories. With luck there will be 50+ decent candidates up against culpable individuals in place for the next General Election and maybe even a couple of bi-elections before. I’m sure that during this time Labour will be trying the usual trick of highlighting local issues in isolation, it’s happening in Kettering at the moment, but I want the debate to be about the bigger picture including Labours failings with PPI lumbering trusts with debts, runaway costs and contracting out of services.
In the mean time I’m going to do my bit by trying to consider the following list of questions in my blog during November and onwards, if you think of others please leave them as comments
- What is the NHS?
- What are the alternatives to the NHS?
- Is the NHS actually any good?
- Who actually benefits from privatising the NHS?
- Is it too late to save the NHS?
- Who should decide on health priorities?
- Are patient expectations too high?
- Should any treatments be off-limits for the NHS?
- Should the NHS do more to improve recovery through greater use of support services? Eg physiotherapy
- Should the NHS remit encompass prevention?
- Should the NHS provide community based care?
- Should the NHS offer unscientific “therapies”?
- Is the pharmaceutical industry ripping us off?
- Is it intrinsically wrong to close hospitals?
- Are waiting lists wrong?
- Will competition improve care?
- Will competition reduce costs?
- Should GP surgeries provide more services?
- Should GPs be employed by the NHS?
- Is there any point in minor injuries units?
- What catchment/populace should 24h A&E serve?
- How small a population justifies a general hospital?
Wish me luck
I found this in an old union paper: A late 20s me saving the NHS from the Thatcher Government in 1990
For the past century, whenever the time came to empty the family home following a bereavement the relatives would encounter history, lots of it, sometimes framed and displayed, sometimes organised in scrapbooks or albums, sometimes randomly dumped in boxes. A life in photographs, tangible evidence of a life lived; relationships, holidays, parties, weddings, christenings, funerals, the first day at school, graduations, grandchildren – so many grandchildren. We’ve been going through this for the last month at my parents’ house following my mother’s death, like the majority of families in our position we go through it all carefully because it would be disrespectful to just throw things away, to discard lives lived, to forget. And it has been helpful, even quite enjoyable, remembering good times as a family, learning more about lives before we were born and events we hadn’t necessarily been aware of.
Now, thinking about this accumulation of evidence of ancestors, of how they lived and what they were like, history that periodically surfaces to be consumed by future generations; I worry about my own boxes of history, drawers containing thousands of photos, and I am acutely aware that my family history now becomes very sparse in 2002. The year we as a family stopped using cameras with negative film and went entirely digital. We take far more photos than we ever did before, but we print rarely, and only for framed display; we share our images freely through networks and social media, everyone who cares now probably already has what they want of our shared existence. Our albums are now folders on discs, phones and hard drives; backed up and always to hand to show our favourites to friends and acquaintances, but they will die with us. Hard drives, CDs and DVDs full of images will require forensic technologies to extract the images in years to come and who would have the time to do it justice. There will be hundreds of thousands of images, most barely differing from the previous one; it would take years to find something of real interest unless you already knew where to look. My family history is becoming ephemeral, more fleeting than that of my parents and I need to do something about it for my own children’s and grandchildren’s sake.
Next weekend I will invest in a good quality photo-printer and start to catalogue the future and last ten years in printed images that will go into photo albums and boxes to be discovered in the loft when I’m dead. Not a lot of pictures, probably a small percentage of what we and others take and share, but enough to tell a family history for our children and grand children.
For the next two days I am taking part in a software development workshop with our French programmers at the Savant offices in Burton-on-Kendal. Previous workshops have been held in Nice, but sending half a dozen NHS staff to the French Riviera is now completely out of the question; it is actually quicker and cheaper for me to fly to Nice where the Medinfo offices and the Ibis Hotel are on the airport perimeter, but I have to admit I prefer trains to planes, Cumbria to The Riviera and small independent hotels to international chains, and I utterly detest airports. This time we are staying at the Royal Hotel in Kirkby Lonsdale; judging by the website it’s the kind of hotel I dream of owning when I retire. I will probably write and post a review here on the journey back for those who are interested.
The taxi driver from Oxenholme decided to take us into “Kirby” along a very pretty meandering river that the Department of Transport have decided should be classified as “B” for bloody wet. Along the way we saw the best double rainbow ever but unfortunately both my phone and camera were in my bag. I’ve never visited “Kirby” before but I will be back, it is very pretty. The Hotel definitely gives a good first impression and my room has the biggest en-suite I’ve ever experienced.
The view from my Hotel room
Yet more writing from a train
Puppy training
Last night was Dylan’s first puppy training session and I went along with Anna straight after getting home from Birmingham. We arrived promptly at the due time and were immediately chastised because we forgot his inoculation record, joking about it was a mistake. I’ve rarely had dealings with anyone quite as humourless or stern as Nora the puppy trainer; in a previous life she must have been a concentration camp commandant.
Several of the new inmates were a bit excitable so the first exercise involved learning how to calm your puppy by stepping on his lead as close as possible to the collar to pin his head to the floor, if that failed the back up was nailing his ears to the ground with a Hilti gun but thankfully that didn’t prove necessary on this occasion. Our next problem was failing to comply with the strict rules for identification tags, Dylan had none, and it seems we’ll be going to prison because of this; I half expected that my fillings would be removed with a pair of pliers before I was marched out of the room to be shot.
We made it to the end of the hour-long session and, despite being the youngest there by 3 weeks, Dylan performed pretty well, he was well on top of sit, down and heel by the end. He also maintained most of his personality, Nora will have another go at beating it out of him next week but I feel confident that we will overcome this, I do however fear for some of the others whose owners were systematically hectored into blind acceptance of Nora’s fascist diktats on puppy husbandry.
Dylan 16 weeks: Poor quality camera phone image, but it’s the delay between pressing the shutter and the image capture that makes this photo good, he hit me before it finished saving
I asked my daughter to read this and she thinks it makes me sound like a mad conspiracy theorist – maybe I am.
I’m in Birmingham again today so another 3 hours on trains in which I will do some reading and write a bit more for my blog.
Homeopathy
Where do you start with a subject like homeopathy? Voodoo science for new age atheists. Clearly I’m a teeny bit sceptical about everything to do with it and my views may upset some of the more gullible amongst my friends and family who might read this. For those that don’t know I’ll briefly try to describe how it “works”.
The principle is that a very small amount of something bad is actually good for you. A homeopath will take a measured small amount of the substance of interest and dissolve in a small amount of pure water, then using a process of doubling dilution (repeatedly taking half and making up to the original volume with more pure water), they will reduce the concentration of the original substance to less than 1 molecule in the dose of “medicine”. Less than 1 molecule is actually nothing so the end product is pure water.
A homeopath will tell you that the water remembers what was dissolved in it and it is this water memory that provides the medicinal effect. If water memory (utterly implausible gobbledygook) was a true effect even a short consideration of the water cycle, taught to every secondary educated child in the UK, would make it clear that water has been around a long time and by now would be overflowing with memories of all sorts of shit. So at best our homeopathic medicine is pure water, a placebo akin to faith healing for the gullible believer who thinks they’re being treated so they feel a bit better in themselves and they do indeed get a bit better. This actually becomes dangerous when misguided practitioners encourage a patient (either by accident or design) to rely solely on pure water therapy, rather than traditional, scientifically tested and proven drugs.
Jeremy Hunt
So why did I feel the need to tell you about my low opinions of homeopathy? Well, yesterday in the cabinet reshuffle Andrew Lansley was replaced at the Department of Health by Jeremy Hunt, previously Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and it was widely reported that he believes in the benefits of homeopathy. I don’t actually think he believes in homeopathy per se. I’m sure that the benefits from his perspective are down to the basics i.e. money. Using pure water as a medicine is significantly cheaper than traditional, scientifically tested and proven drugs, the NHS drug bill is huge and reducing it by replacing real medicine with voodoo has got to be a big money saver. Also real medicines have been shown to prolong patients’ lives thereby requiring even more demand for further medicines and hospital care during the period of prolonged life. Patients who don’t get the drugs required to prolong their life become a significantly lower burden on the NHS. It is also likely that the patients who are stupid enough to go along with this are also very unlikely to be public school educated Oxbridge graduates; they are going to be wishy-washy hippy liberals or the poorly educated masses, people who either don’t vote or at least don’t vote Tory. The burden of taxes paid by the rich for poor people getting treated in the NHS is reduced and the underproductive individuals who consume services disproportionately are purged from society more rapidly.
Of course the other reason to be disappointed by Jeremy Hunt’s move from Culture is that it removes opportunities of live broadcasts to repeat one of the most entertaining spoonerism gaffs of recent years. Such as this wonderful example from Naughty James Naughtie introducing an interview with Jeremy Hunt on BBC Radio 4 Today programme in December 2010.
This morning I am on the train to Birmingham where I am double booked with meetings in New Street and Edgbaston and the main news is about the minor reshuffle taking place in the Government. Ken Clarke, too inclusive, a bit left wing, “not one of us”, will be demoted. Baroness Warsi, Asian descent, female, “not one of us”, will go, scapegoat for failed PR. Nothing to get excited about, there’s no chance that any of the ruling public schooled clique will pay for the mess were in, because perversely that group as a whole seem to be doing quite well while the rest of the population pay more for less.
Chancellor Osborne himself was booed by many of the 80,000 spectators at the Paralympic athletics last night during a medal ceremony; he smirked, almost seemed like he was pleased with the response, he knew they were really booing the previous Labour administration who he continues to blame for our continuing recession. Over at the aquatics centre former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown was received with applause despite the continuous vilification he has had from Osborne as architect of the global downturn. Quantitative easing (printing more money) has been the principle tool to stimulate growth so far, it seems most of the new billions of pounds have been soaked up by the bank accounts of those who already had most, there has been no stimulus and no growth, but the value of everyone else’s money has been reduced while the rich grow richer.
I don’t claim to know anything about how the economy works, but I do observe that those who are most vocal and claim to have the answers are also those that have most to lose if Governments did decide to do things differently. The super rich and big business decide on the rules of the economy and they in turn sponsor Governments and the media in support of their economic rules. Ordinary people are manipulated to support a system that benefits those who have money, this is fine when they are happy with increasing standards of living and social cohesion is maintained. At the moment I worry we are approaching a crisis point, the Government needs to do something to stimulate real growth for everyone and the rich may need to pay a bit more to do it.
Yesterday David Davies suggested plan B was required to kick start the economy, unfortunately his plan B was a much bigger dose of plan A; bigger, deeper cuts for the majority and tax cuts for the rich. Really, do they all think we are all stupid, this is a democracy, my vote is actually worth exactly the same as that of every other citizen (at least it would be without the distortions of our electoral system, one for another time). If you ignore the Mediterranean, news media suggests other countries don’t seem to be suffering anything like as badly as the ordinary people of Britain, the ordinary people of Britain see this and will have their revenge. Osborne will have the smirk wiped off his face eventually.
My final post about my mother will be little more than a plea to those who have been moved by her story to make a donation to Mind. A giving site has been established at http://memoryspace.mind.org.uk/MemorySpace/Helen-Lankester, if you haven’t read the earlier posts please follow these links
Helen and Bill August 14, 2012
Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating: RIP Helen of Norway August 19, 2012
Around one in four people will suffer some form of mental health issue in the UK during their lifetime, most families will be affected in some way, but the NHS has always treated mental health issues as a poor relation to other acute and chronic medical conditions. Where the NHS currently falls short Mind can provide help and advice through the website at http://www.mind.org.uk if you or a loved one is showing signs of mental illness. They are also active at the political level campaigning for a higher profile and better provision of community NHS services that bear the brunt of mental health demand.
Helen will be buried with her husband William Lankester on Tuesday 28 August 2012 at Fulbourn Cemetery following a short service in St Vigor’s Church at 11am. Family and friends are then invited to The Six Bells for a buffet lunch.
I brushed down my suit this morning and was disappointed to discover how much it had shrunk since I last had cause to wear it. It also makes me look somewhat greyer in hair tone and complexion than it used to, life goes on.
My mother passed away about 9 pm Saturday evening, I feel guilt, a good son would have done more to help her.
A typical obituary will include a few facts and this will be no different but I make no claims on their veracity. For many years my mother had no grasp of the difference between real and thought, many of my facts come through a verbal history pre-dating her diagnosis but maybe tainted by the incipient disease. I have no inclination to check them now. In my mother’s world the Cartesian Cogitum ergo sum – I think therefore I am, became Cogitum ergo est – I think therefore it is.
Ellen Ryrie Lankester (nee Thain); born 10 March 1939, died 18 August 2012, age 73. Survived by 3 sons, 6 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.
Ellen was born in Lybster, Caithness. She was the 4th of 9 children that survived to adulthood (others didn’t). Her father was a fisherman and died relatively young as the majority of trawler-men did in those days, her mother was permanently pregnant and also died young as a consequence. The verbal history says that mum’s (great?) grandfather was a Norwegian fisherman who moved to Lybster when it was home to one of the largest herring fleets in Europe.
Helen of Norway was born in China (date unknown) of Norwegian royal parents ……. was in Auschwitz but was smuggled out somehow and sailed on The Bismarck into the North Sea a launch delivered her to Lybster harbour where she was adopted by a kindly fisher family and gained many step brothers and sisters.
She left home at about the time of her father’s death to go into service at Barnwell Manor, home to the Duke of Gloucester. While working there she would visit her older sister who had married and settled in Fulbourn to start a family, it was during one of these visits that she met Bill. He was immediately smitten and remained so for the rest of his life. They were married at St Vigors in the village on 14 August 1960 within months of first meeting. Bill used savings and loans to buy a caravan on a site at Shelford where they lived for 2½ years and I was born in June ’61.
Helen of Norway had been a confident of Winston Churchill, and was an original member of the SAS …. she first met Bill in Auschwitz, he was also a survivor. AlanLank is heir to the throne of Norway!
The council house that was to become home for the next 49 years became available just before David was born and it was only 100 yards from Bill’s parents in Fulbourn. I remember this being a difficult time, I think Helen suffered severe post natal depression and as a result both David and I spent some time with relatives. Simon was born 3 years later and more time was spent with relatives, the proximity of the in-laws also became an issue for her, and she despaired of Bill’s irregular and over-long shifts on the railway.
The 60s and 70s happened, the family became more comfortable, Bill bought the council house from Edward Heath and slowly started to rebuild it. Grandma died in ’74 and Helen relaxed a bit, but struggled to keep control as the sole woman in a male household. Teenage boys became more challenging, I moved in with Granddad just down the road for a couple of years while I finished O levels. I left home for good, initially for university but I was determined to keep away, mum went downhill almost straight away. Early ’80s Mum sent me birthday cards in my true alien name and informed me that Bill wasn’t my real father (he is). She then found God, or he found her, and she attended churches of all denominations to work out which represented her God, but none matched and she felt isolated.
In ’83 I met Justine and took her to meet my parents, it was my first visit home in 3 years although they had come to see me in Bristol occasionally. My relationship with them became much more mature thanks to Justine. Helen’s schizophrenia was diagnosed about this time, there were crises and she had to be hospitalised more than once, many of Bill’s possessions were broken and burned during one crisis. In1991 wall to wall news during the first Gulf war was a huge problem, she didn’t sleep for days then sealed the doors and windows to protect against gas attacks, another spell in hospital was necessary and she would rarely stay in the same room as a television after this.
Then in the mid ’90s came Hodgkin’s Disease, it was high grade and advanced at diagnosis, symptoms initially missed or unreported due to the schizophrenia. Prognosis was initially very poor but she sailed through aggressive, high dose chemotherapy. She lost the sight in one eye due to CMV infection but her hearing returned following several years of progressive deafness. And she remained disease free at all subsequent checks. On one of her visits to the ophthalmology department during her Hodgkin’s treatment she took exception to unhelpful, overstretched staff who ignored ringing phones and left patients waiting unattended for hours. She took a call from a lady complaining about the repeated cancellation at short notice of her husbands laser cataract surgery, she made notes of the case details and promised that the surgery would take place imminently. The details were left with the department managers to clear up the mess.
Over the following 5 years, periods of control and stability would be broken by a new development, and each time Bill worked harder to help her. She finally understood how much she needed him after an imagined affair caused her to run away to Lybster, Bill fetched her back with the help of her sisters. The years after Bill’s retirement were their best together, she loved the regular cruises, the socialising, having people to talk to about her exotic past; all with Bill’s support and they both thrived on it. In a bizarre side story Helen became a correspondent with Yitzhak Rabin, writing to him about the Middle east peace process, and receiving replies and Christmas cards.
When Bill died in 2006 she was utterly lost, the controlling hand was gone, she had more time to sit and think and the thoughts became crazier . She became increasingly concerned for the safety of BBC local radio presenter Sue Marchant, she had been a frequent caller to Radio Cambridge for years and had several mentions as Helen of Norway, but I think they must ultimately have blocked her as she made less sense. Phone calls to friends and relatives became more frequent and less comprehensible, we had to try to change the subject and get her to talk about normal, real things. Eventually it all became too much for her.
In her life Helen Lankester was part of the most loving, generous and forgiving couple I will ever know. Through her (somewhat unconventional) faith in a God and a Heaven she knew that her and Bill would be together again and I want to believe it is this that determined the course of the last 9 months. Helen Lankester probably died between Christmas 2011 and Easter 2012 it just took until 18 August for facts to catch up with her.
I’ve never been tempted to blog before, I am stupidly busy at work but can’t do anything, I’m hoping this proves cathartic. It’s probably poorly written and the facts may not be strictly true just how I remember them at the moment. I doubt anyone will read it but if you do I hope it says what I needed to say.
Alan
The heart attack that killed my father 6 years ago at age 70 was many years in the making but thankfully sudden in its effectiveness.
Bill had been unwell with other obesity related conditions over the years prior to his death, but the NHS was always able to patch him up and send him back home as a fully functioning and useful member of society. Indeed he had his attack while manoeuvring his motor bike out of the garage on his way to look after his sister’s garden. What the NHS did for Bill over those years was incredibly cost-effective, because each time they got him back home he returned to the job the NHS couldn’t possibly afford to do as a front line carer for his wife.
My mother required significant care due to disease progression since being diagnosed with schizophrenia 20 years before. We (their 3 sons) knew that Bill had been doing more and more for Helen as years had gone by. We suspected that she made no significant contribution to cooking or cleaning at home (but Bill never complained about this) and we were acutely aware of how embarrassing she could be in public. Bill however persevered; made sure she was medicated and remained part of their shared community, and he gave them both a decent quality of life in the process. Helen devoted more of her time to smoking, usually sitting in the conservatory watching while Bill worked outside on his lawns, fish pond and the incredibly productive vegetable garden befitting a child of austerity and rationing. The house became a difficult place to visit with the yellowing walls and intense odours of tar and nicotine, but Bill was unwilling to restrict Helen’s addiction as it gave him a level of control over and compliance from Helen; so we would visit less often and never stayed over.
When Bill died we tried to persuade Helen to move into a small warden monitored bungalow in the village, but she wouldn’t (couldn’t) move from the house they had shared for 43 years. A gardener was employed to prevent the garden becoming a jungle and my youngest brother and his wife became de-facto carers because they lived close enough. They would visit several times a day, make sure there was food, take away the washing, ensure she took her medication and directly manage her finances; she was convinced she owned several major banks. They also discovered that they qualified for carers allowance, but it didn’t really cover the true costs to them.
For a while Helen continued with some of the social activities that she had done with dad. We encouraged her to go to the pub for lunch every day. Many of the customers knew her, they understood her disease, went along with the stories and they were her friends, but it couldn’t last. We got used to the frequent insane phone calls about plots, gunmen, secret messages broadcast by Radio Cambridge, her new boyfriend/husband. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating.
Her care needs became more onerous after a fall sustaining a broken hip, she lived downstairs and required 4 carer home visits every day in addition to the regular visits by my brother and his wife. Last Christmas there was a dramatic change, she would no longer eat some of her favourite foods, anything unwrapped was contaminated or poisoned. Alternatives were identified but they all eventually went on her not to be eaten list. In early April the phone calls suddenly stopped and by this time she was eating nothing and drinking very little. The carers and my brother alerted the Health Centre who took samples and monitored the deterioration of renal function, eventually in early May the carers called an ambulance and she went into A&E. She was re-hydrated, her renal function was “restored”, an irregular cardiac rhythm was corrected and she was sent home after a couple of weeks.
The phone calls returned but were now very different, much less coherent, usually whispered and always ended whenever food was mentioned; after a couple of weeks they stopped completely again. At the start of July the carers again had her rushed to hospital by ambulance with all the earlier symptoms plus Clostridium difficile infection.
She went into emergency admissions short stay assessment isolation ward and stayed there while staff attempted to treat the symptoms and eradicate the C. diff; but this time it wasn’t so easy. Feeding tubes, lines, catheters were pulled out when staff were not in attendance, attempts to get to the bottom of the not eating were rebuffed and no physical cause could be identified. Tests showed no immune system, poor renal function, and other organ failure, but once stabilised she was initially coherent. After a couple of weeks the underlying psychiatric nature became more apparent to the staff and, after discussions, it was decided to use a feeding harness to build her strength enough to overcome the anti-eating psychosis and allow transfer to a care home. This approach failed when she regurgitated food into her airway and developed mild pneumonia.
Six days ago we agreed that all support should stop and she would be made comfortable with morphine, the expectation was that she would die within 24 to 72 hours. As I write this I have not yet been notified of any change since I saw her yesterday, so assume she is still barely responsive, slowly dying in her room on the short stay assessment ward from dehydration/organ failure and I just wish there was more leeway in law for the medical staff to actually help her die.
My mother died 4 days later: Read the follow up post here
Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating: RIP Helen of Norway August 19, 2012
@AlanLank 