 |
| View from bed in Hibiscus Hospice overlooking Peninsula golf course |
On the wall here is a printed card about A4 size that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in a New Zealand hospital. (They may be common elsewhere but I wouldn't know that.) It indicates to the hospice staff the level of dependency of the current room occupant.
In my case the I and INDEPENDENT have been circled with a black marker pen. Basically this means that I am pretty much able to take care of myself though in practice I do need some assistance with showering.
I had been giving some thought to my experience of, and feelings about, dependency in recent weeks so what better place to write about it than here in the peace and quiet. Especially now before the golf course is turned into yet another housing development and the peace of the hospice is dislocated by earthworks and construction clamour.
Saturday January 11th 2014
.JPG) |
| Sharon and Nolan |
But of course I didn't. I find I go into such weeks full of ideas as to what I will read, write, catch up on, but little if none of it happens as the routines of each day take over. Perhaps I was too distracted by the view from my bed and the procession of golfers coming down the hill (from what, I think, must be the tenth tee) on to the fairway before me. But I did scribble some notes about ageing and dependency and have since avoided seeing if they add up to anything worthwhile to put into a blog. It will be interesting to see the date when, and if, these ideas are finally formed into something I am happy to publish.
Thursday January 16th
Finding plenty of reasons to avoid pursuing this but today I will try to write some more.
In my notebook I scribbled down a number of things:
'...the sense of power that other's dependency gives you...'
I think there is a danger that caregivers over define themselves in terms of their role as caregiver to the detriment of other important aspects of their life; a little like a mother and child relationship where the mother's total self-image is bound up in the role of mother, needing the child's dependency to bolster their sense of who they are.
"...wanting 'a psychological power of attorney' - speaking on, acting on behalf of the dependent, knowing how they are and what is best for them better than they do themselves..."
"...tendency with doctors/care service workers to talk about the patient's condition in front of the patient, pre-empting the patient's own self analysis..."
These last two scribbles are self-explanatory and I am sure are well recognised issues. It is particularly likely to happen if the patient's caregiver is present - the caregiver becomes the primary focus of attention. In my experience it happens a lot, particularly with men. I noticed last time I was in North Shore Hospital how often it was the patient's wife/partner who had to take on board the information about drugs and diet and treatments because the man had abandoned any control of these things to her. Often this is a function of memory loss or maybe just memory neglect - if you don't have to remember stuff you won't look for memory aids to help you by. As my health has fluctuated over the last eighteen months Sharon and I have found ourselves periodically needing to renegotiate how much she does for me so that now, when I am better than I was this time last year, I take back some responsibility for doing things for myself whenever I can. [I jest that I will take to driving again but know better than to do that connected to an oxygen cylinder.]
Monday January 20th
More procrastination.
As to ageing, I added nothing to my notes while in the hospice but have some earlier ones to fill out and add to.
"Ageing as the closing down of freedoms, opportunities... Locked in in older years to the person you invented and the accumulated responsibilities that accrue as a consequence - living up to an image of yourself that has become yourself.... Which version of myself did I choose to live?"
The person I am now would be something of a surprise, perhaps even shock, to the socialist London Scot I was in my teens and twenties. I would never have imagined for one moment that I would live in New Zealand for most of my life, have a career as an academic, build two houses and marry four times.
"Meditation - Zen present but it is the past that I like to meditate upon."
Much of the advice to the elderly (and to everyone these days it seems) is to live 'in the moment', to focus on the here and now and make the most of each minute - Carpe Diem/Seize the Day etc. But it is mostly the past that I like to meditate upon. This makes some sense if you have, as I do, a chronic lung condition that necessitates 24 hours a day on oxygen and makes you hyper-conscious of your breathing. If I really concentrate on the moment, as I am forced to do much of the time, it is to monitor the inflow and outflow of air through my lungs. To avoid the incipient panic that this process can engender (and override the sheer tedium of managing it effectively) I need to find distractions from the present not reinforcements of it. I do this by blogging - mostly about the past - by listening to music, reading, watching television, playing Words with Friends on my iPad and daydreaming. The most absorbing of these activities is undoubtedly the blogging.
Back in March 2012 a comment on one of my blogs was that it was sad that I seemed to be looking to the past so much. The author hoped I would find the process cathartic and then move on to deal with the present challenges in my life. I replied that some of the pieces that I posted were cathartic at the time they were written (mostly around 2000-2004) but that the principle function of my blog for me was to have some fun writing and some distraction from the routines of life with bronchiectasis*.
As to a number of the past pieces, primarily the family ones, they have opened up some interesting discussions with my sisters as we share our different memories of the same events and our different understandings of the nuances and significances surrounding those events.
Friday 24th January
More scribbles from my notebook.
Jotted down from a web item recently shared with me on Facebook:
"To the old, I would show them how death comes not with the aging process but with forgetting." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his letter saying goodbye to the public life due to his lymphatic cancer.
Of course Marquez is not referring to the short-term forgetting that haunts us all as we age (did I already sugar my tea or not? and other 'senior moments') but to the forgetting of significant events and experiences from our past. For me these significant events and experiences are not necessarily achievements, though I am more than content with those, indeed proud of them. What I most cherish are Proust's moments bienheureuse. Such moments are not merely happy recollections and reminiscences but blissful unexpected magic moments triggered in the recall of the past and in the Zen of my current life. I find many of them tied to times when I felt a special bond, however briefly, with another person - child, friend, lover, partner - or with the natural world around me.
All this focus on the past is not to say that I am unconscious of the pleasures of the present. One of my Dad's favourite daily mantras when we were children was "Count Your Blessings". As a rebellious teenager conscious of the mess the world was in, I found it too Panglossian for my taste, but this year I adopted it as one of three New Year resolutions. So I have recorded reflective moments and enjoyable times in my diary. Here are some of the January ones so far:
2nd: At Waiwera Beach with Sharon watching families playing by the sea.
3rd: Breakfast on the deck on a gorgeous morning.
4th: Anna Ivanovic beating Venus Williams to win Auckland tennis tournament.
5th: Visit from Elizabeth and Alan.
6th: Perfect day - temperature 23/24degrees, low humidity, gentle breeze; visit from Brian Henshall; walk.
8th: Early morning Chopin on iPad; enjoyable walk.
9th: Cup of tea at sunrise, the early morning sunshine warming my face, the freshness of the air after rain.
10th: Picnic lunch at beach with Sharon.
11th: Lisa dropping off fresh snapper on way home from Whangarei Heads and me still in my dressing gown.
13th: 8am sunbathe on deck with Karl Jenkins' Hear only heavenly music on the headphones; walked to beach.
14th: Huat and Lynette for lunch.
15th: Lunch at beach with Sharon plus beachwalk to edge of sea at low tide.
16th: Masssage from Ute; visit from Susie.
17th: Chat with Brian Patrick at Petanque.
18th: Drinks with Valma and Gordie sitting on their deck watching the remote controlled yachts on Kensington Lake.
19th: Pancakes and Espresso Coffee on deck for breakfast; a wet shave; watching Anna Ivanovic beat Serena Williams 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 at Australian Open. (And yes I do like to watch Anna Ivanovic because she is so beautiful.)
20th: Visit from Anne.
21st: Photo from my daughter-in-law Claire of my grandson Dominic explaining what's what to the Beefeater at the Tower of London;
tropical pork fillet tenderloin salad for dinner with glass of reisling, rounded off with a chocolate pinot noir truffle.
22nd: 6.18am - the first sip of a cup of tea.
23rd: Visit from Harriet, James, Rory and Mila - swimming at the pool plus lunch; massage from Ute.
24th: 8am sunbathing on the deck, music on the headphones, a heron flying up the valley.
Sunday 26th January
26th: Treated myself this morning to a fresh cannula, supplied by Thompson Engineering in the USA and so delightfully soft that I scarcely know I am wearing it [Check out their website http://softhose.com].
Enough of this. Time to round it off and let it go to the readers of my blog spread through sixty-four countries (see blog 62 for the list).
Let me leave you with some pieces from 'Sands at Seventy' that Walt Whitman, who was 72 when he died, wrote during the last years of his life.
As I Sit Writing Here
As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
Not my least burden is that dullness of the years, querilities,
Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui
May filter in my daily songs.
Memories
How sweet the silent backward tracings!
The wanderings as in dreams - the meditation of old times resumed - their loves, joys, persons, voyages.
Halcyon Days
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor'd middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fullness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish'd and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
[*For previous blogs referring to my bronchiectasis see 4. My Other Online World (November 2011) and 21."Why Me?" The History and Mystery of My Bronchiectasis (December 2011).]
Thursday January 16th
Finding plenty of reasons to avoid pursuing this but today I will try to write some more.
In my notebook I scribbled down a number of things:
'...the sense of power that other's dependency gives you...'
I think there is a danger that caregivers over define themselves in terms of their role as caregiver to the detriment of other important aspects of their life; a little like a mother and child relationship where the mother's total self-image is bound up in the role of mother, needing the child's dependency to bolster their sense of who they are.
"...wanting 'a psychological power of attorney' - speaking on, acting on behalf of the dependent, knowing how they are and what is best for them better than they do themselves..."
"...tendency with doctors/care service workers to talk about the patient's condition in front of the patient, pre-empting the patient's own self analysis..."
These last two scribbles are self-explanatory and I am sure are well recognised issues. It is particularly likely to happen if the patient's caregiver is present - the caregiver becomes the primary focus of attention. In my experience it happens a lot, particularly with men. I noticed last time I was in North Shore Hospital how often it was the patient's wife/partner who had to take on board the information about drugs and diet and treatments because the man had abandoned any control of these things to her. Often this is a function of memory loss or maybe just memory neglect - if you don't have to remember stuff you won't look for memory aids to help you by. As my health has fluctuated over the last eighteen months Sharon and I have found ourselves periodically needing to renegotiate how much she does for me so that now, when I am better than I was this time last year, I take back some responsibility for doing things for myself whenever I can. [I jest that I will take to driving again but know better than to do that connected to an oxygen cylinder.]
Monday January 20th
More procrastination.
As to ageing, I added nothing to my notes while in the hospice but have some earlier ones to fill out and add to.
"Ageing as the closing down of freedoms, opportunities... Locked in in older years to the person you invented and the accumulated responsibilities that accrue as a consequence - living up to an image of yourself that has become yourself.... Which version of myself did I choose to live?"
The person I am now would be something of a surprise, perhaps even shock, to the socialist London Scot I was in my teens and twenties. I would never have imagined for one moment that I would live in New Zealand for most of my life, have a career as an academic, build two houses and marry four times.
"Meditation - Zen present but it is the past that I like to meditate upon."
Much of the advice to the elderly (and to everyone these days it seems) is to live 'in the moment', to focus on the here and now and make the most of each minute - Carpe Diem/Seize the Day etc. But it is mostly the past that I like to meditate upon. This makes some sense if you have, as I do, a chronic lung condition that necessitates 24 hours a day on oxygen and makes you hyper-conscious of your breathing. If I really concentrate on the moment, as I am forced to do much of the time, it is to monitor the inflow and outflow of air through my lungs. To avoid the incipient panic that this process can engender (and override the sheer tedium of managing it effectively) I need to find distractions from the present not reinforcements of it. I do this by blogging - mostly about the past - by listening to music, reading, watching television, playing Words with Friends on my iPad and daydreaming. The most absorbing of these activities is undoubtedly the blogging.
Back in March 2012 a comment on one of my blogs was that it was sad that I seemed to be looking to the past so much. The author hoped I would find the process cathartic and then move on to deal with the present challenges in my life. I replied that some of the pieces that I posted were cathartic at the time they were written (mostly around 2000-2004) but that the principle function of my blog for me was to have some fun writing and some distraction from the routines of life with bronchiectasis*.
As to a number of the past pieces, primarily the family ones, they have opened up some interesting discussions with my sisters as we share our different memories of the same events and our different understandings of the nuances and significances surrounding those events.
Friday 24th January
More scribbles from my notebook.
Jotted down from a web item recently shared with me on Facebook:
"To the old, I would show them how death comes not with the aging process but with forgetting." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his letter saying goodbye to the public life due to his lymphatic cancer.
Of course Marquez is not referring to the short-term forgetting that haunts us all as we age (did I already sugar my tea or not? and other 'senior moments') but to the forgetting of significant events and experiences from our past. For me these significant events and experiences are not necessarily achievements, though I am more than content with those, indeed proud of them. What I most cherish are Proust's moments bienheureuse. Such moments are not merely happy recollections and reminiscences but blissful unexpected magic moments triggered in the recall of the past and in the Zen of my current life. I find many of them tied to times when I felt a special bond, however briefly, with another person - child, friend, lover, partner - or with the natural world around me.
All this focus on the past is not to say that I am unconscious of the pleasures of the present. One of my Dad's favourite daily mantras when we were children was "Count Your Blessings". As a rebellious teenager conscious of the mess the world was in, I found it too Panglossian for my taste, but this year I adopted it as one of three New Year resolutions. So I have recorded reflective moments and enjoyable times in my diary. Here are some of the January ones so far:
2nd: At Waiwera Beach with Sharon watching families playing by the sea.
3rd: Breakfast on the deck on a gorgeous morning.
4th: Anna Ivanovic beating Venus Williams to win Auckland tennis tournament.
5th: Visit from Elizabeth and Alan.
6th: Perfect day - temperature 23/24degrees, low humidity, gentle breeze; visit from Brian Henshall; walk.
8th: Early morning Chopin on iPad; enjoyable walk.
9th: Cup of tea at sunrise, the early morning sunshine warming my face, the freshness of the air after rain.
10th: Picnic lunch at beach with Sharon.
11th: Lisa dropping off fresh snapper on way home from Whangarei Heads and me still in my dressing gown.
13th: 8am sunbathe on deck with Karl Jenkins' Hear only heavenly music on the headphones; walked to beach.
14th: Huat and Lynette for lunch.
15th: Lunch at beach with Sharon plus beachwalk to edge of sea at low tide.
16th: Masssage from Ute; visit from Susie.
17th: Chat with Brian Patrick at Petanque.
18th: Drinks with Valma and Gordie sitting on their deck watching the remote controlled yachts on Kensington Lake.
19th: Pancakes and Espresso Coffee on deck for breakfast; a wet shave; watching Anna Ivanovic beat Serena Williams 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 at Australian Open. (And yes I do like to watch Anna Ivanovic because she is so beautiful.)
20th: Visit from Anne.
21st: Photo from my daughter-in-law Claire of my grandson Dominic explaining what's what to the Beefeater at the Tower of London;
22nd: 6.18am - the first sip of a cup of tea.
23rd: Visit from Harriet, James, Rory and Mila - swimming at the pool plus lunch; massage from Ute.
 |
| Rory (left) and cousin Mila |
 |
| James (Rory's older sister) |
Sunday 26th January
26th: Treated myself this morning to a fresh cannula, supplied by Thompson Engineering in the USA and so delightfully soft that I scarcely know I am wearing it [Check out their website http://softhose.com].
Enough of this. Time to round it off and let it go to the readers of my blog spread through sixty-four countries (see blog 62 for the list).
Let me leave you with some pieces from 'Sands at Seventy' that Walt Whitman, who was 72 when he died, wrote during the last years of his life.
As I Sit Writing Here
As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
Not my least burden is that dullness of the years, querilities,
Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui
May filter in my daily songs.
Memories
How sweet the silent backward tracings!
The wanderings as in dreams - the meditation of old times resumed - their loves, joys, persons, voyages.
Halcyon Days
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor'd middle age, nor victories of politics or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fullness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish'd and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!
[*For previous blogs referring to my bronchiectasis see 4. My Other Online World (November 2011) and 21."Why Me?" The History and Mystery of My Bronchiectasis (December 2011).]
Hiya! Been trying to reply on my blog but the IPad isn't cooperating. Your cons. Seems a bit clueless, the bottle is full ovf IV antibiotics delivered under pressure over 24 hours, this enables me to stay at home. Sadly it didn't work this time and I am currently in quod for two weeks for IV's and physio. As a former Prime Minister commented, " life wasn't meant to be easy" , but he failed to finish the GBS quote ", my child; but it can be delightful". Hang in there!
ReplyDelete