Tuesday March 24th
So, this needs to be done. A blog, a diary, who knows how it will turn out? I am struggling, really struggling today. The whole family has been a bit down, maybe just the effects of 10 days in the same space trying to get all of our heads round this craziness, managing our competing demands on time, on attention, on Wifi, on priorities. After a mini meltdown early last week we had settled into a sort of rhythm but today it just isn’t working: I just got to the point of thinking I just can’t do this anymore, the sense of futility and hopelessness was overwhelming.
I am now in the office, finally, but I am struggling, really struggling to get any work done at all today. So I am starting this. Writing has for some time been my solace, my therapy. I am driven by wanting to change people’s opinions, to stand up for what’s right and stand for a change. Maybe this won’t do any of those things, but maybe one day in the future, maybe this will be important information to someone. How else will the scientists and researchers in the future know what worked and what didn’t? Not just the health scientists who could usefully benefit from knowing if self isolating made any difference to individuals, but the behavioural analysts, political scientists, educational researchers of the future. One day, sometime in the future, when this is all being pieced together then this, our stories will be important and our memories, in hindsight, will not be the same at all.
Today a big thing that is on my mind is – where are the human stories? Of the families already affected, the doctors, the nurses, the ICU units? We have seen shocking footage of Italy and Spain, we have seen doctors in tears from these countries describing their day. But in this country only a video of a nurse urging us not to panic buy (an impactful video nonetheless) and a video of medical staff in Belfast fairly stoically reinforcing the “stay distant” message. We have had videos of people worrying about jobs and livelihoods. But so little about the human life cost of this – which is precisely the message that people seem to need to actually do something. I don’t understand – this could be such a powerful message. If 422 people had died in a train crash, a plane, a terrorist attack, their faces and memories and stories would be shared and it would bring the very human cost home to many more people. But even locally we are just given a demographic “a 72 year old man with underlying health conditions”, “a 65 year old woman” and people think “I am only 26 so I don’t need to worry then”. On Twitter some doctors are sharing limited stories of how hard it is, but why aren’t their voices on the news, in our faces?
We NEED to be shocked – too many people just carrying on as normal as if it is something that only happens to “others” and not to them (and sadly it has confirmed that to many people “others” just don’t count enough to give up almost anything).
I am heartbroken to have watched our government and prime minister do so little when they had the chance to act earlier and save lives. This is not a politically biased statement – more a statement about the disconnect between the voice of respected and eminent scientists and the decisions made by our leaders. When this is studied in the history lessons of the future students will say, “but why didn’t they act when they still could?”, “why did they think Britain’s disease course would defeat the patterns shown in all other countries?”, and hardest of all, “why wasn’t there an uprising of the people?” and “why didn’t people do more to hold their government to account?”. I look on my local MP’s Twitter page, and there am I, lone constituent, urging him to use his power to challenge his party leader and insist on stronger measures. It only occurred to me to do this latterly – is that the way we have come to think about democracy – that we elect them in and then leave them to get on with making decisions we fundamentally disagree with?
I am saddened and shocked that it seems OK now to dismiss those with “underlying health conditions” as expendable – when reporting on the deaths, after every one, “he/she had an underlying health condition”. Oh that’s OK then? What is the point of modern medicine, hospitals, GP surgeries, medical research if in the end we don’t really care if these people live or die? And when I say “these people” that’s me too – I have an underlying health condition. You would never know it though – like many people like me I live with it, it doesn’t define me in life, so why should it if I succumbed to an illness such as this?
I am saddened too by the actions of so many, which is way beyond selfish. If we come through the other side of this, we will have all lost something in this crisis – the collective good being greater than the sum of its parts. It simply isn’t. There are exceptions to this, individual acts of kindness, people going out of their way to help neighbours, but the people who choose to go out to busy spots this weekend and mix amongst other people, spreading this silent killer to take home to their communities “because its sunny”? Words fail me. What has it come to for us as a society when our actions could save the lives of others, and ourselves, our simple actions yet we (collectively) choose not to? Even here in Devon where there are still wide open spaces to be found, people are congregating together, carefree, eating ice cream, laughing.
I see their pictures from my isolation at home and weep.
ourmiracledaughter 