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    Power Mannequins
    Power Mannequins
    Power Mannequins
    Ebook173 pages2 hours

    Power Mannequins

    By Richard Lung

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    About this ebook

    I have been complaining about the robbing of Ellas rights as a human being, and a free citizen, enshrined in the Mental Capacity Act, which the Hardie report says is not being implemented. The alleged grounds for her care home “detention” or imprisonment was that she would be better looked after, there. Even that is false. I am sorry if the following account of Ellas sufferings is tiresome. It is much more tiresome to Ella! So much so, that I’m driven to explain how Ellas basic physical needs are not being met. In her 1 August phone call, Ella herself realises, and wants to be away, because things are only going to get worse for her, as winter approaches, in the care home.
    She says this isn’t what she worked all her life for, to sit all day, with a blanket over her legs. She complains that her feet are “like ice”, or like “heavy lead”. She has to constantly and tiredly work them up and down, and still can’t get them warm. She suffers from swollen legs.
    For years, I kept my mother supplied with hot water bottles, to keep her warm, and ease the pain of arthritis in her hips and joints. (They are not allowed in institutions.)
    Ella is a pneumonia-history patient. She almost died of it, as a child, and the doctor said she will always feel the cold. When she was about 30, her husband saved her life by swaddling her in blankets up to her nostrils.
    Since her institutionalisation, Ella has constantly complained about the cold, because she is abnormally prone to feeling it. T
    Ella is “stuck” in a big draughty lounge. Both sets of doors have to be kept open, to let the air circulate. Even then, she is barraged by chronic bouts of coughing and sneezing, from other residents. As she told me, that’s the worst about being among a lot of people, you catch all their illnesses.
    Since being institutionalised, Ella has been kept daily on various pills, no doubt, to calm her restless antagonism to her deprivation of liberty.
    It is a Brave New World medication to fit the individual to an institution, instead of the individual choosing where and with who to live.
    Ella is extremely sensitive to the cold. Her north facing care home bedroom is too cold for comfort. It is not sustainable for her, in winter.
    We had that problem at home. The living room is north facing. I assembled a cosy bed for her, in the corner. But it was too cold a spot for her. So, I’ve had installed an insulated bay window, to get rid of the drafts, so she can move into the sunny south-facing dining room.
    We also had the wrong sort of heating, as does the care home bedroom. Thermostat heating tends to blast out heat, and then turn chilly. It doesn’t continually warm the air, which, Ella told me, is what she needs. I’ve had central heating installed, at home, so a room in winter was like a mild summers day.
    A Best Interest meeting prided itself, in getting Ella off a purée diet. But this is what she needs. (It takes a speech therapy committee to allow her back on it! It’s like Imperialist or Communist micro-management.) The result was, two days later, on 8 february 2020, Ella had to be rushed to hospital for emergency surgery of a prolapse, with much loss of blood.
    Nothing was learned. Ella was still fed randomly from the food trolley.
    (The best interest meeting, aggrandising the care home over our dwelling, reminds of communist propaganda to bolster their low quality of life. The care home is communal catering. Ella is an individual, whose individual needs cannot be properly known, let alone met, in a mass care environment.)
    Ella told me she couldn’t eat hard foods. I had bought a heavy duty blender (JR Ultra) so both of us, old people with weak and worn and damaged teeth, could get the nutrients from broken-down foods.

    As I’ve said before, there are some fine people at the care home, who do a difficult job. As I have told a few of them (the bottom line), mother and son want to be back home together.
    .

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard Lung
    Release dateAug 3, 2020
    ISBN9781005703141
    Power Mannequins
    Author

    Richard Lung

    My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

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      Power Mannequins - Richard Lung

      Table of Contents

      Introduction.

      Power Mannequins.

      July.

      August.

      September.

      Introduction

      I have been complaining about the robbing of Ellas rights as a human being, and a free citizen, enshrined in the Mental Capacity Act, which the Hardie report says is not being implemented. The alleged grounds for her care home detention or imprisonment was that she would be better looked after, there. Even that is false. I am sorry if the following account of Ellas sufferings is tiresome. It is much more tiresome to Ella! So much so, that I’m driven to explain how her basic physical needs are not being met. In her 1 August phone call, Ella herself realises, and wants to be away, because things are only going to get worse for her, as winter approaches, in the care home.

      She says this isn’t what she worked all her life for, to sit all day, with a blanket over her legs. She complains that her feet are like ice, or like heavy lead. She has to constantly and tiredly work them up and down, and still can’t get them warm. She suffers from swollen legs, as she did when she first arrived.

      For more years, than I can remember, I kept my mother continuously supplied with hot water bottles, to keep her warm, and ease the pain of arthritis in her hips and joints. (They are not allowed in institutions, but I never scorched Ella. You don’t need to use scorching water.)

      As I keep saying, Ella is a pneumonia-history patient. She almost died of it, as a child, and the doctor said she will always feel the cold. When she was about 30, her husband saved her life by swaddling her in blankets up to her nostrils. (When she was about 40, it was touch and go, whether she would survive some very bad virus, which the doctor said he could do nothing for.)

      Since put in institutions, Ella has constantly complained about the cold, because she is abnormally prone to feeling it. The care home only caters for people who, normally, are not so susceptible.

      Ellas options are limited. She is stuck, as she put it, in a big draughty lounge. (The hall is worse.) Both sets of doors have to be kept open, to let the air circulate. Even then, she is barraged by chronic bouts of coughing and sneezing, from other residents. As she told me, that’s the worst about being among a lot of people, you catch all their illnesses.

      As a matter-of-fact, Ella caught a water infection, that had been going round. She had to be put on a 5 day course of antibiotics, which gave her terrifying hallucinations of snakes at the bottom of the bed, making her afraid to go to sleep, till exhaustion over-took her in the morning.

      Since being institutionalised, Ella has been kept daily on various pills, no doubt, to calm her restless antagonism to her deprivation of liberty.

      It is a Brave New World medication to fit the individual to an institution, instead of the individual choosing where and with who to live.

      Ella is extremely sensitive to the cold. Her north facing care home bedroom is too cold for comfort. It is not sustainable for her, in winter.

      We had that problem at home. The living room is north facing. I assembled a cosy bed for her, in the corner. But it was too cold a spot for her. So, I've had installed an insulated bay window, to get rid of the drafts, so she can move into the sunny south-facing dining room.

      We also had the wrong sort of heating, as does the care home bedroom. Thermostat heating tends to blast out heat, and then turn chilly. It doesn’t continually warm the air, which, Ella told me, is what she needs. I’ve had central heating installed, at home, so a room in winter was like a mild summers day.

      Our dining room also now has an en suite toilet in a closet with an extractor fan, because of Ellas limited mobility.

      The young tiger tooths at the care home prided themselves, as their Best Interest meeting put it, in getting Ella off a purée diet. But this is what she needs. The result of care hme improvements was, two days later, on 8 february 2020, Ella had to be rushed to hospital for emergency surgery of a prolapse, with much loss of blood.

      It takes a language and speech therapy committee to allow her back on a purée diet! It’s like Imperial or Communist micro-management. Britain has caught the disease of autocratic officialdom. (And I believe even an impaired Ella has a way with words beyond gobbledygook land.)

      Nothing was learned from Ellas near fatality. Ella was still fed randomly from the food trolley. Some white stodge, neither of us could have eaten, I was informed was macaroni. The alternative offering was glutinous sandwiches, like eating plaster, which Ella also had to turn down. She was left with tinned mandarin oranges (9 March 2020). Some of the staff still have not learned that she does not take sugar in her tea. She gets offered sickly cakes and hard sugary biscuits (junk food).

      (The best interest meeting, aggrandising the care home over our dwelling, reminds of soviet propaganda to bolster their low quality of life. The care home is communal catering. Ella is an individual, whose individual needs cannot be properly known, let alone met, in a mass care environment.)

      When I fed her, Ella told me she couldn’t eat hard foods. To anticipate her problem, I bought a heavy duty blender (JR Ultra) so both of us, old people with weak and worn and damaged teeth, could get the nutrients from broken-down foods.

      Since entering the care home, Ella has been sore from sitting all day. They have tried to accommodate her, with a water-mattress and, at one time, a water cushion. That’s fine, but Ella will complain of a chair, as like sitting on a mountain-side. The manager put it down to skin deterioration.

      There is more to it than that. Ella has a curved spine, as well as damaged cartilage and lock-knee. So, she could never lie face down, to get relief from the sore on her back-side. However, she could get this relief, in her bedroom, at home. It has a double bed joined to a lower single bed, and Ella could belly flop, to sleep, over the two levels, the only place I’ve seen her able to do this.

      As I’ve said before, there are some fine people at the care home, who do a difficult job. As I have told a few of them, mother and son want to be back home together.

      The above discussion was prompted by my 1 august call. This was redoubled, on 2 august, by my mothers complaints, lasting nearly two hours on the phone, in the context of having to go to bed early, with worsening swelling of her legs; the unsuitable heating arrangements in the care home, for a person who nearly died from pneumonia, and does not believe she can survive the winter, in such adverse conditions for her, personally, with her individual history of illness. That, and else, on top of the boredom and loneliness and misery of her captivity away from home with her son.

      This worsening situation, for a poorly 95 year old, prompted me to bring forward a further publication (Number 6 to the series: Family-splitting.) I decide to call it Power Mannequins. This adopts my mothers expression.

      Some notes follow, on our conversations.

      Looking backwards, there did seem a decline in Ellas judgment. No doubt, I just put that down to ageing. However, after the onset of dementia, it’s been apparent to me that Ella retained considerable intelligence. She could reason with me, still, and out-reason me. In her later years, perhaps struggling to cope, she became more defensive, dogmatic or self-righteous.

      After her mental impairment took over, she could admit she made mistakes, and be more willing to trust in my judgment. Perhaps something lost had been regained, in her character. Not only that, but there was something of a physical reversion. She managed to shed her excess weight and regain her original slimness. (Social services secret approaching, of informers on me, included trying to blame me, for not feeding her, when her body may have been trying to re-stabilise, at an original healthy natural weight. She was still off her food, at the hospital, for a considerable time.)

      Even more striking, Ella had been like her father, in old age, becoming hard of hearing. It seemed like a hereditary trait, to pass from acute hearing to deafness. Yet, the return to her natural weight, came with a return to excellent hearing. She was always telling me, on the phone, not to speak so loud!

      All the bedrooms, that Ella lived in, were upstairs. A bedroom was linked in her mind as upstairs.

      I suspect, from former experience, if you drew her attention, to her being on one level or one floor, she might notice it, for a moment, then forget.

      This reminds me of my childhood of 5 years old. If I looked very hard at the wheels of my parents car, I noticed they were on an axle. Just one of my school drawings recognise this, because it was a really hard effort of thought, for this 5-year-old, that I could not keep up, at the time. Afterwards, I went back to drawing the wheels like hoops underneath the chassis.

      I suspect that, like my infant self, my aged mother had difficulty with keeping the right details in mind. It was the same difficulty, just coming from great age, rather than early youth.

      It can hardly be exaggerated how under-rated is the difficulty of the occupation of thinking. I devoted my life to thinking. Yet I have the feeling that perhaps most of my life, I was just clawing ineffectually at the surface of the business.

      In one of her passing remarks, Ella made the humorous observation that some people just live – without thinking at all. But she would warn me not to do too much thinking. Ella herself had to think really hard, day and night, how to make sales. So she knew the dangers of over-thinking. (This contrariness, to ones own policy, reminds of the episode in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, where the two naïve gold-diggers visit Vienna for advice from Prof Freud, who tells them to get some inhibitions.)

      [23 august:] Ella asks (She might well ask) What did they build this place for? Is it a castle? It’s a prison, isn’t it? ---

      The care home has been converted into a prison, with code-locked door. Imagine how demoralising to think oneself – and to be -- imprisoned for nothing. Mis-government has a lot to answer for.

      I think highly regretable that carers have been turned into jailers, with those code-locked care-home doors. We need to get back to checking out.

      Alexander Solzhenitsyn said he was not against collectivisation, only forced collectivisation. Britain needs to end social workers (how proletarian!) using care homes as forced collectives.

      My inability to free my mother, from the grip of the authorities, has brought a terrible feeling of helplessness. All my adult life, I studied by the motto: Know the truth and it will make you free. Government control, over you, thrives on secrecy.

      This journal, and the previous journals, attempt to convey the authentic voice of Ella; to understand her state of mind. In that respect, they are no different from the work of any editor of another human beings thoughts and feelings. I have not tried to minimise her dementia. It was not always within my ability to reproduce some garbled sentences, but that is also true of the garbled passages of my own speech!

      I have treated as authentic, in their own right, containing important elements of truth, the periods when Ella appears to be living in a dream world, at variance with the common sense of everyday life. I have been sensitive to Ellas insensitivity to space and time; chronology, the passage of time, and geography, an awareness of location. That is obviously key to her impaired mental condition. I want to be able to share and speak, as well as possible, the new language of her altered world-view. I don’t want to smooth over the differences, to her perception, between now and then, because that wouldn’t help us to communicate properly.

      The truth of the matter is that Ellas speech is generally more coherent, than my limited efficiency at transcribing it. It is important for the reader to understand this, otherwise they might attribute a limited mental capacity to Ella, that really belongs to

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