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Sad and inconvenient truths

Life, as an elderly uncle commented the other day, joshing me gently with a black-humoured chuckle, is a terminal disease.

The notion is not incompatible with the principle that all lives are equally important.

Amidst the continuing media storm over the Government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, much of it fuelled by recriminations hatched via the convenience of 20/20 vision hindsight, it may not be popular to remind anyone of the fact, not least because it is a happy accompaniment of human existence that we always regard ourselves as living in the present.

From the viewpoint of a child of six living in lockdown today twelve years olds are ancient, parents positively prehistoric and grandparents frozen in time as relics from the antediluvian period.

As someone rapidly approaching my eighth decade, I am as concerned and/or outraged as anyone about the plight of those poor souls currently living in retirement/care homes, albeit from a distance of one remove in the sense that simultaneously I find it nigh impossible to contemplate the possibility that I may well be living in one myself by the onset of my ninth.

As a GP put it to me not so many months ago: “The thing is, if something else doesn’t get you first, eventually old age will”.

C’est la vie, m’dears.

See here for my text of the day – an article by Denis Campbell, health policy editor, that appears upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

Sobering as it may be, there are ‘high risk’ groups all around – many of them coming under the general heading “underlying health issues” … and those are just the ones that are obvious and/or observable, and that’s ignoring those e.g. affecting mental health, that are not.

Hard as it may be to accept, most powers-that-be (ultimately national governments, if not world organisations) devise their policies by reference to their best available advice, research and projections before working out their strategies and tactics.

Or they ought to. In doing so from time to time they may have to balance a variety of different and sometimes mutually exclusive and/or seemingly opposing interests.

And inevitably sometimes will have the unenviable task of making judgements and decisions which, in assisting or protecting one group, will thereby disadvantage or adversely affect others. One might quip that in comparison King Solomon had it easy … (or maybe, actually, he didn’t).

Anyway I’m glad I don’t have to do it.

About a decade and a half ago I attended a presentation given to a group interested in Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by a research professor at a well-known London hospital.

She dropped into her talk – almost as an aside – a fact which had a considerable impact and has stayed with me ever since (and I mention it aware of the possibility that in the period since things may have changed), viz. that the average life expectancy of someone with Alzheimer’s is just six and a half years from diagnosis.

Two other items I believe to be facts. Most males over the age of seventy five have a prostate cancer issue of one degree or another even if they don’t die of it – they usually end up dying of something else first.

By the same token, these days many more people are recorded as suffering from dementia than previously, partly because we’re all living longer: in times gone by, a far larger proportion of the population died from something else before they ever developed the condition.

Such considerations are perhaps unwelcome and awkward to confront. But – along with everything else – they sometimes have to be taken into account.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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About Wendy Lewis

A former GP in the Home Counties, Wendy’s busy life revolves around her husband, grandchildren and two Labrador dogs – though not necessarily in that order. More Posts