Maybe it took Covid19 to open our eyes ?

I remember the weeks after Daisy's birth, when she was in the neonatal unit, and the hours turned to days, the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned into months....two long months.

I remember feeling numb and scared and confused at first and then, I settled into a routine, I went with the flow.

It was December when Daisy was born, just three days before Christmas.  The lights and decorations were up, the weather was dark and stormy and the big tree outside the neonatal unit was bare of leaves.

By the time she was discharged, two months later, the evenings were slowly getting lighter, there was a sense of impending spring in the air as the first leaves appeared on the tree and the Christmas decorations had been replaced with easter eggs.

And in a strangely familiar way I've settled into lockdown life.  From my previous post of feeling as though I was being put back into my gilded cage I now feel very peaceful, I can't change the situation but now I've reframed how I feel about it.

This is a time to stop, the whole world is on pause, I'm not going to miss anything. It's a bonus extra time with my children, I have often felt guilty about the time I missed with them when they were growing up and I was caring for Daisy, torn between home and hospital, I didn't anticipate this time would come but it has and while it's not always smooth sailing at home with four very strong and very different personalities under one roof, I know I will never have this time them again.

Yes there is a daily battle about the state of the kitchen and who is going to put the bins out.  They seem to sleep an inordinate amount of time and when not sleeping they eat, a lot.  I'm trying to juggle work commitments with being with them, and yes, still homeschooling (I still have one in full time compulsory education after all). But we are enjoying family time together, cooking on the barbecue, getting creative about what is available in the shops and planning menus around it. I am learning how to master the playstation (game of choice is COD: Modern Warfare, for such a pacifist I really like to shoot machine guns!), I'm getting to grips with the house admin and paperwork, I'm still managing to do some freelance work, I'm writing, I'm catching up with friends online, as always I'm running - but most importantly I'm resting and enjoying the slower pace of life, the peace...I'm taking time literally and figuratively to smell the roses.

When this crisis hit my instinct was to go into my default hyper-vigilant mode, to busy myself and to think about what I could do to help.  I wanted to be on the frontline, I have skills in this area, I am used to being around very sick people, I was exploring healthcare assistant roles, ward domestic roles...anywhere I could help.  But I stopped, because I realised that my kids need me, I don't need to contribute to anymore anxiety by putting myself at risk of exposure to Covid.  It's time to be selfish for once and just slow down.

And it's a good feeling.  Having this time.  It's allowed me to reflect on the things that I care about, the causes that I talk about .

I really hope that when this is over things will change.  For me the learning has been very personal, that it's OK to slow down, that it's OK to put myself first.

But for the world I really hope that we take away two things:

Medicine doesn't have all the answers - this has been the starkest wake-up call for the world. I knew that for years, I knew that the team treating Daisy did not have a magic wand in their back pockets to make her better, to keep her alive until adulthood, I still remember a registrar at Great Ormond Street telling me that "when we get to this level of medical complexity it's all academic guesswork" and I accepted that, I still looked for possible ways we could help Daisy in my quest to leave no stone unturned but ultimately I knew that no matter how brilliant science is, it doesn't have all the answers.

And this is the world we are facing now, we are forced to peep out from our sanitised view of health and face some stark realities.  As you know, I write and speak regularly about the importance of vaccination for healthy communities and to protect the vulnerable.  Now, we are all vulnerable, there is no vaccine or treatment for this disease and we are still learning how it impacts different members of our community.

This is the world where medicine does not have all the answers, were we have to become more self reliant, where we have to think about taking care of ourselves and those around us.  This is what the world is like when there is no vaccine to protect us.

And the other thing that the Covid pandemic has taught us is that we all live finite lives.  That death is inevitable and sometimes it visits when we least expect.

If you read my blog regularly you know this (here's a particularly relevant post).  The scale of death and illness that this virus has spread is unspeakable. It breaks my heart that dying people are separated from their loved ones in their final hours, that those left behind can't find solace in a funeral gathering.

Now more than ever it's important to "get our affairs in order" - that curiously victorian phrase.....now is the time to speak to our loved ones about our wishes, about resuscitation, about funerals, about wills, all those things we put off or think are for people who are dying or older, they are for all of us.

I know there is so much pressure for those of us to stay at home to use this time productively: bake stuff, make stuff, do zoom fitness, learn a skill....a few years ago that would have been me, hyperbusy to avoid actually thinking about things, now maybe the best thing we can do is to just be calm and reflect and enjoy this time.

But the most important thing we can use this time to do is to sort out those big things on our to do list that we really have not wanted to do, we ALL need to "get out affairs in order" no matter our age or health status, and this means the following:

1. Make a will - even more important if you have children under 18, what happens to them if you don't name guardians for them? Do you want to be buried or cremated? Where do you want your ashes scattered? Who is going to end up with your prized collection of gig tickets and festival lanyards?

2.Write an advance directive.  I've written about this here . It's about thinking about your wishes should you find yourself in a resuscitation situation or unable to communicate for yourself.  It's not just about DNARs (do not attempt active resuscitation) it's also about ensuring you communicate your wishes for full active resuscitation in certain scenarios. This is especially important if you are in a situation where you can't speak for yourself.

3. Sort out some life insurance if you have dependent children.  Without life insurance when Andy died we would have lost our home, the only certainty and stability my children had in their lives, the place where they feel safe.

4. Think about your digital legacy. This is another thing I've spoken about a lot; what happens to your social media if you die?  who knows how to get into your phone contacts, your email, your bank account?  Make a list, you don't have to give it to someone but ensure that at least one person knows where it is in case of your unexpected death.  Think about legacy contacts for your social media, I still have access to Andy's facebook information because he assigned me as his legacy contact (he also wrote down all of his passwords and log ins before he died), if I did not have this there was a risk of his account being deleted and along with that all the photos and videos and posts that he had made.

Sadly it's taken Covid19 to open our eyes to these important things, but it's also given us some precious time to pause and reflect and regroup and think about how we want to live our lives when this is all over.

Right, that's it, I'm off for my daily exercise, of course I don't walk, I run, some things will never change!

Sending love to all of my lovely friends working on the NHS frontline - stay safe, you are always in my thoughts 🌈

Is this the wake up call?

I was in Dublin last week for a little mini break and I did what every visitor to Dublin does, I went to the Guinness Brewery and took a tour. While I was there I watched a presentation about the Guinness Family, and about Arthur Guinness, and his wife Olivia.  They had  21 children, only 10 of them survived to maturity.

OK, so that's a lot of kids, but the statistics were still the same, without antibiotics, without immunisations, children died, babies died.  Death was all around; you just need to visit a cemetery to gain some perspective, you can spot the graves of the people who died in the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. Now we can vaccinate against common strains of flu, against polio, against measles and so many other diseases....

We are no longer surrounded by death, modern science sanitised us and saved us, wiped out diseases that once struck fear into the hearts of parents and we have fallen into an easy complacency, confident that modern medicine will have the answers.

 We have come to rely on wellness and on science being able to help, to intervene, to make things better.

And this is why we are currently paralysed by shock and fear.

This new mutated virus, Covid 19, a corona virus, has reminded us of our frailty, that medicine is not infallible, that it does not have all the answers.

Those of us who care or who have cared for the sickest and most vulnerable of our society know that already.  We are professionals at hand washing and infection control, the majority of us will take up offers of vaccinations if the person we care for is able to have it, after all why expose them to any further risk?

 We tell people to stay away if they they have a communicable disease, knowing that for the person we care for even a simple cold can end up with a hospital stay.

This is the reality of thousands, day in day out, forced to self isolate in order to protect their loved one

And now we have a global pandemic and I see people questioning government and health professional advice, panic buying, confused and complaining.

So here are some facts as I , as simple lay person who just happens to have a lot of health care experience, understands them.

Yes Covid is in many cases just like a bad cold.  But in some people it's not, in the weak, the immunosuppressed, the vulnerable, it's more than that, it can be fatal.

This evening I read that there are 900 people in Italy in intensive care, 900 people needing ventilators to breathe.  A simple cold to one person is a death sentence to another .

And because this virus has never been seen before and therefore there is no herd immunity, that's why if we suspect we may have it, we need to self isolate, to protect others.

It's not for ourselves, if we are strong and healthy, hopefully we won't need hospital care.  But it's for those who are not, for those who can't fight it.  It's about them not us, it's about protecting the most vulnerable of our citizens.

And those who care for them and those we rely on to care for us.

If we are ill we expect doctors and nurses to be there, but what if they are ill?

And this is why I support vaccination....this is what our world would be like if we did not have vaccinations, only multiple times worse.  We are seeing deaths from Covid 19 and are shocked.  This is the reality when we don't have immunity to a virus.

So what can you do?

From where I sit , I am now in a position of privilege.  For 12 years I cared for a very fragile child who spent a lot of her time bouncing in and out of hospital, susceptible to infection, especially in her final years.  I spent a year caring for her daddy as his immune system was wiped out by chemo.  I needed to be well to care for them and keep them safe.  If I was in that situation now I would put our house on lock down. But to know that the less vulnerable people in our community were able to protect me and my family, that's what I would have needed.

So look around, who lives nearby who may be at risk, for whom contracting Covid 19 will be far worse than "just a simple cold".  Minimise your risk of spread by meticulous hand-washing - why does it take this pandemic to hammer this home?  Didn't we talk about this when there was a lot of scaremongering about MRSA and Cdiff...hand-washing was and will always be a simple precaution that we should all do, pandemic or not, to prevent cross infection and protect the vulnerable.  Those of us who care for the vulnerable know that.

And the other thing, if you are shopping and stock piling, why not buy for two? Stop being selfish, think about the people who are genuinely in need, knock on their door, ask them if they need anything, deliver a bag of groceries.

If you have ever posted a "be more kind" meme then this is your chance to put it into action. Get to know the members of our society who are more vulnerable, less privileged and help them, protect them.

Oh and lastly, maybe, just maybe, this is the wake up call you need if you have ever wavered , that vaccines are a good thing , they protect the weak and vulnerable....this is a glimpse into a world where vaccines didn't exist, where people died where parents lived in fear....do you really want to return to that world?

This is our wake up call.