The Trouble with Old People

The quality of U.K. TV Channel Four programmes is variable. It produces the best of TV (Jon Snow’s Channel Four News, for example) and the very worst (‘Big Brother’ and the rest of the so called ‘reality’ shows). But currently it’s presenting a series of programmes on Britain’s elderly population, the first relayed yesterday.

Tony Robinson, actor, archaeologist and Labour Party activist, introduced a programme called ‘Me and my Mum’. He had always had an uneasy relationship with his mother, he said. Now in a Care Home where she has been for seven years he visits her regularly, and we and the film crew went with him. For ten seconds, he said, there is recognition but then she retreats into her state of dementia, and there is no possibility of real engagement. During the course of filming the programme she suffered an attack of pneumonia and Robinson and his daughter were there as she declined and, later that day after the filming was over, died.

Robinson interviewed a number of people in a similar situation. A father in care, was visited by his daughters every day, pretending that he would eventually get better and come home; his tearful wife, feeling guilty that she couldn’t look after him. Another daughter who had given up a well paid executive job to care for her mother at home, railed at a system by which she was paid £45 a week care allowance to look after her. Robinson visited a Home where there was a lively programme of activities – including a recent visit from a stripper. A 98 year old resident said all the old men who usually sit at the back wanted to come to the front. ‘Was anyone offended’ she was asked. ’No’ she replied, as if the idea had not occurred to her.

Asking the woman in charge of his mother’s care, Robinson said ‘Does the end of our lives have to be so bad or is there something we can do about it?’ ‘Probably’ was the answer, but it would cost billions and billions. I wouldn’t want to end my days in a place like this, but then I couldn’t manage my mother at home.’ Robinson and his family felt the same, but he met an extraordinary woman who did just that. Agreeing it was hard (she hadn’t been out on her own for three years), she quoted a phrase ‘there is nothing good or bad that thinking makes it so.’

This was an unusual and impressive programme. Robinson ended it by saying that whereas we can get worked up about school dinners and spend millions invading other countries, we give insufficient thought to how we care for people at the end of their lives. ‘It’s time to give priority to older people’, he concluded.

Bryan

The Future of Ageing

This is the heading of an article by Alok Jha which I have been reading (the invaluable ‘Guardian’ again). It surveys the link between age and health. Here are some extracts.

‘Between the ages of 30 and 80, a person will lose 40% of their muscle mass. The story is similar with our bones: the strength and mass of the skeleton rises until the early 30’s, after which men will lose about 1% of their bone mass per decade. Women lose bone in the same rate in the 10 year run-up to menopause, but, on reaching the menopause, their rate of loss jumps to about 1% per year for several years before going back to the same rate as men. …Weaker muscles mean an inability to move quickly or to react appropriately to prevent a fall, for example…. Perhaps the most striking degradation happens to the brain. After the age of 40 the brain decreases its volume and weight by 5% every year….whilst some people will be relatively unaffected, others will get more forgetful as time passes..’

All this, apparently, ‘depends on a variety of factors, from genetics and what kind of environment we have lived in, to the level of medical care available to us and even our level of education’. Evidence presented to the House of Lords Science Committee’s Inquiry into ageing in 2002, indicated that health expectancy seems to be growing more slowly than life expectancy in Britain, and that the period of debilitating illness at the end of our lives was, in fact, increasing. Masses of research – especially into genes – is in progress. Better prospects for later generations perhaps than for the present generation of older people.

If we have never bothered much about our long-term health, obviously the ageing process can be complicated and unpleasant, and we are back to our old theme of sensible eating and regular exercise. But also, perhaps, we have a mission, which is to help the young to live well so that when they are older they can continue to do so. (Obesity amongst the young is getting so serious in the U.K. that there is talk of the N.H.S. offering surgery to children over 14 to save their health in later age).

We may have done pretty well; we want young people to do even better. And that gets us into campaigns and politics. No bad thing.

Bryan

Milestones

Today I am seventy five. It’s raining outside, we are about our normal business, international news continues to spread gloom and despair at human fallibility, I have a dental appointment. The world goes on. Asked whether he felt different when he broke into the teenage years, my eldest grandson, I remember, said he felt just the same. Of course. But today I do feel different. It’s not that I feel older, though today’s weather hardly lightens one’s tread. It’s that I feel for the first time what has been true for a while. Not older, but old. That’s what happens to other people; being old. I’ve been their friend, have watched them and tried to understand them though sometimes been impatient over their problems. Now at 75 I am one of them too.

This reference we have been making in these articles to ageing – what it means and how to meet it - has not always lightened my days. ‘It’s not ‘them ’ that you are writing about’ I have often thought to myself. ’It’s all about you’. I hope there’s been lots of encouraging news and views in the blogs but there’s been no escaping from the thought that we have been facing the end-years of life. This morning I feel that more keenly than usual.

So, it’s count your blessings time. And I have a superabundance of them and have been totting them up as the morning has progressed. Much of my life has been my work and although like any job there have been difficult times, I have been fulfilled and totally engaged in it. I have a wonderful family. I live in an interesting city, surrounded by beautiful countryside. I have many precious continuing friendships, gathered through the years. I still have work to do. I can keep awake when I am watching TV for quite a long time( by about 9.30!), before I nod off. I keep walking, and am looking forward to sowing seeds on my allotment. I am in reasonable health. My wife and eldest daughter are taking me out to lunch today…and when I got to the Dentist, he said ‘it’s not so bad, only come back if it starts hurting all the time.’

And the next milestone? Eighty, I think, and if I get there and in some sort of recognisable form, I think a major family party might be appropriate, and if no one comes up with the idea, I’ll suggest it myself!

Bryan