This week marks Carers Week 2020, a week where we as a community can make visible, and celebrate, the often unrecognised labour and experiences of those in our community who care for others. In collaboration with NEST (the network for parents and carers at King’s), the EDI Function presents several blogs written by carers. You can find out more about NEST here. The third of our contributors has chosen to remain anonymous:
Caring responsibilities tend to appear unplanned, without any of the supporting infrastructure of childcare. As we know, they hit the middle-aged (often already juggling childcare responsibilities with work) and they disproportionately hit women. All this has become brutally apparent as I’ve assumed partial responsibility for the care of my elderly parent, who lives alone, with dementia, supported by visiting carers. While King’s offers us unpaid leave to deal with caring emergencies, this kind of caring support is a permanent semi-emergency. So many of the elderly parents I know refuse to consider residential care or moving into supported housing, insisting instead on independence, which is scaffolded by a massive and invisible amount of support from, generally, their children.
Academic life makes some of this easier: out of term time, work is often flexible enough to visit at short notice or manage sudden hospital discharges. Term-time is much harder, and the social care system and the NHS both operate on the assumption that a family member will be always available to pop in, accompany to appointments, pick up medication, etc. With dementia sufferers, remote management is multiply challenging as they lose paperwork and forget visits. So caring for me is often simply administration: persuading authorities to send paperwork to me; organising money and shopping; finding a chemist that will deliver medication, and a carer that will keep it hidden; and assessing medical problems remotely. It also, of course, involves lots of repetitive phone conversations, visits, house-clearing, and trips to specialists and dentists. I’ve never taken advantage of the carer’s leave we have, because missing teaching or even meetings is a huge step, and because needs are so unpredictable. I’m resolved to do so if necessary in the future! Lockdown has made all of this much harder, because the daily routine, outings, social contact, and physical intimacy that are critical to dementia sufferers have all been swept away. Isolation has been disastrous for my parent’s mental and physical health, but it is also not possible to get assessments or more carers due to the crisis. The future of social care looks alarming. That said, the patchwork of care we’ve put together is just about holding. I can only imagine how hard this is for colleagues whose relatives live on the other side of the country or across the world.
Anon.