The road to recovery: What happens to people who don’t have the same support?

I’ve not written this blog for a while, principally because I’ve recovered sufficient fitness to return to my day job.
Being a full time financial journalist at a time of global financial turmoil would be exhausting enough were I not taking a pharmacological soup of different nuclear strength drugs to fend off the pain I still have to live with.

I also have the small matter of two utterly delightful, but also demanding and energetic, small children to deal with.
Still, what is pleasing is that even though it is now more than a year since I was stuck under the wheels of an oil tanker, my strength has continued to recover. Enough so that I can now write this blog again, on top of everything else.

What has struck me about the last year is just how astonishingly good some of the care since I’ve been out of hospital has been. We’re not really accustomed to saying much good about the public services in this country, but they can be really rather impressive if you think about it. They have been in my case.

From the inspirational physiotherapists who have and still are helping me to recover my movement, to the doctors and surgeons who have kept an eye on my progress, to the occupational therapist who made sure my house was adapted to enable me to work more or less full time.

But please don’t turn off just yet. This is not, by any means, a eulogy. The professionals I have been seeing might have been brilliant. Accessing their services, that’s another matter. It has required sharp elbows, some harsh words, and a lot of support. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a family around me who have been willing and able to take up the cudgels on my behalf. And cudgels are what have often been needed.

Getting past first base, past the people who control access to the professionals, has often been a long, and debilitating, struggle one just as difficult as having several tonnes of tanker resting on your ribs.

The public services are populated by a vast corps of Douglas Adams’ Vogons, which he described as “bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous”. People who “wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters”.
To be fair, they haven’t all been like this. Some of them have been quite nice. Some. But there are others, who… Well, comparing them to vogons is a little unfair on the grey-green misery guts of Adams’ universe.

What constantly makes me shudder is this: What would have happened to me if I didn’t have people around me like my wife, my mother, my brother – people who are up for a fight and willing to assist me in one?

What happens to people in my situation who don’t have that? People who suffer accidents like mine, but who don’t get the after care. Or troops who return with similar injuries from the various theatres of conflict they have been sent to by politicians only to find themselves the victims of bureuacracies overseen by the colleagues of those politicians when they hit civvy street.

I sometimes feel that people in my position could do with is a despachante, the Brazilian “professional” whose job it is to work their way around that country’s confusing bureuacracy for people wanting to do business there.
But even they might baulk at some of the behaviour we’ve occasionally had to deal with.

It is a sad fact that in the debate over public services and public finances what never comes up is this question: how can we make what we have better with the resources that are there? Or at least easier for people to deal with. That’s a shame really.

You’d think there ought to be a vote or two in it somewhere.

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• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=782750622 Ruth Lincoln

  Hi James, I became disabled three years ago. I agree with your paragraphs about: “What do others do who don’t have family?” 
  I do have family – a mother, brother (& Sister in law). None of them are in a position to fight on my behalf. Yes they’re brilliant at helping with practical and physical needs – but it always takes me to get well enough to do anything about anything. 
  I don’t have a husband or family of my own, so I am left feeling that I encroach on others all of the time – I am continually reminded that everyone has their own families and lives.
  I used to think my friends were wonderful people and I love them dearly, many have fallen by the wayside, out of sight – out of mind. I now realise that the people I had around me didn’t share the same core values as myself. A hard lesson to learn.
  I live alone, with my 65 year old mum popping in. My brother flies in and out, balancing a full time job, a wife, three children, two elderly mums (MIL) and a disabled sister. 
  I now study all weekend, every weekend, everybody I know is off doing things with their families. 
  So in answer to your question.. I think they die a slow, lonely, painful death, at the mercy of the state. Whether they’ve worked all of their lives or not.

• http://www.facebook.com/bernadette.bowles.50 Bernadette Bowles

  My experience with my adult daughter over the last year has made it very clear to me that you are absolutely right.  Our public services are populated with people who refuse to believe anything they’re told and also with systems designed to kick the vulnerable when they’re down.  She had been unwell for a while with one symptom after another; from never going to the doctor she was there all the time.  At one point she was assured that it wasn’t possible for a pain such as she described to exist.  They did blood tests, but as all that it showed was low vit. D they told her she was fine and offered her anti-depressants.  Then her legs suddenly went numb and walking became very difficult.  You’d think this might be a worrying symptom, but when more blood tests didn’t show anything she was told she was suffering from stress.  It wasn’t till I got involved and camped out at A&E until they agreed to do the MRI that her GP had refused, that things started moving.  Within 2 days she had a neurologist’s appointment – she has MS.  Meanwhile, she had been made redundant, her recent poor health had probably not helped.  She was given ESA and housing benefit; while in hospital on high-dose steroids she was sent a monster form.  She had a bad reaction to the steroids; when she was well enough to deal with the form it was 2 days late.  They immediately stopped all her benefits.  She tried to appeal, but was told they would hold a review in 6 weeks and she could not appeal till then.  She pointed out that she had a doctor’s certificate, and could provide details from the hospital and the consultant that she was genuinely ill.  She was told that they had no doubt that she was ill, but the form had been late and that was all that mattered.  She asked to go onto job-seeker’s instead and was told she couldn’t as she was signed off as too ill to work.  Her MP finally sorted it out for her, but had her father not been able to help financially she would have been homeless as well as sick.  It really shouldn’t be necessary to fight like this, how do people cope if they don’t have family able to support them?

• John Morgan

  Keep pushing the points James. I note that politicians are currently talking again in terms of ‘averages’ – the ‘average’ waiting time for instance. The point is, that we’re dealing with people not spreadsheets.

  I have to say, I’m delighted to see that your back at the ‘typewriter’,

  With every good wish

  John