For bedridden:
chair based:
For the road to recovery:
- yoga (v gentle)
- strengthening and balance
Shoulder exercises - more advanced
gluteal muscles - more advanced
balance, yoga
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Saturday, September 23, 2017
Cutting from the Guardian re death and mourning in Irish culture
Why the Irish get death right
Saturday 9 September 2017 06.00 BST Kevin Toolishttps://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/09/why-the-irish-get-death-right#comment-104984893
We’ve lost our way with death, says Kevin Toolis – but the Irish wake, where the living, the bereaved and the dead remain bound together, shows us the way things could be done
In the narrow room the old man lay close to death.
Two days before, he had ceased to speak, lapsed into unconsciousness, and the final vigil had begun. The ravages of cancer had eaten into the flesh leaving only a skeletal husk. The heart beat on and the lungs drew breath but it was impossible to tell if he remained aware.
In the bare whitewashed room, no bigger than a prison cell, 10 watchers – the mná caointe – the wailing women, were calling out, keening, sharing the last moments of the life, and the death, of this man. My father. Sonny.
“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.”
In the tight, enclosed space, the sound of this chorus of voices boomed off the walls, the ceiling, louder and louder, reverberating, verse after verse, on and on, cradling Sonny into death.
This death so open, so different from the denial of the Anglo-Saxon world would, too, be Sonny’s last parental lesson.
How to die.
If you have never been to an Irish wake, or only seen the movie version, you probably think a wake is just another Irish piss up, a few pints around the corpse and an open coffin. But you would be wrong.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, death is a whisper. Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, lower our voices and draw the screens. We want to give the dead, dying and the grieving room. We say we do so because we don’t want to intrude. And that is true but not for these reasons.
We don’t want to intrude because we don’t want to look at the mirror of our own death. We have lost our way with death.
On the Irish island where my family have lived in the same village for the last 200 years, and in much of the rest of Ireland, death still speaks with a louder voice. Along with the weather reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local Mayo country and western radio station runs a thrice daily deaths announcement enumerating the deaths and the funeral arrangements of the 10 or so daily freshly departed. There is even a phone line, 95c a minute, just so you can check up on those corpses you might have missed.
There should be nothing strange about this. In the absence of war and catastrophe, humans across the planet die at an annual rate of 1%; 200,000 dead people a day, 73m dead people a year. An even spread. It’s happening all around you even as you read this article; the block opposite, the neighbouring street and your local hospital.
If the local radio in London or New York did the same as that Mayo station, the announcer would have to read out the names of 230 dead strangers, three times a day, just to keep up.
Of course, if you live in a city such as London, where 85,000 people die each year, you would never know of these things. Such a very public naming of the dead, an annunciation of our universal mortality, would be an act of revelation in the Anglo-Saxon world. And likely deemed an outrage against “public decency” – which would almost certainly lead to advertising boycotts and protests.
More shocking still then would be the discovery of another country where the dying, like Sonny, the living, the bereaved and the dead still openly share the world and remain bound together in the Irish wake.
And death, in its very ordinariness, is no stranger.
My father, Sonny Toolis, was too a very ordinary man. He was never rich or powerful or important. He never held public office and his name never appeared in the newspapers. The world never paid him much attention and Sonny also knew the world never would. He was born poor in a village on an island, devoid of electricity, mains water and tarred roads, in much the same way the poor have been born in such places for most of human history.
Sonny never got the chance to get much of an education and worked most of his life as a foreman on building sites earning the money to pay for the university education of his seven children.
Sonny was good with his hands though. Useful to have around if things went wrong with the electric, the drains, or you needed the furniture moved. He had his limitations; he did not like strange peppery foods, he wasn’t very comfortable wearing suits, and he was terrible at giving speeches at weddings.
He did have a great singing voice, played the bagpipes and the accordion, and taught his children to sing by what he called the air – by listening along. In the 1960s, he bought a 35mm German camera, took pictures, and ran the prints off in his own darkroom. He even shot film on Super 8. But it was never more than a hobby. Like a lot of us, Sonny had some talents he would never fully realise in life.
But Sonny really did have one advantage over most of us. He knew how to die. And he knew how to do that because his island mothers and fathers, and all the generations before, had shared their deaths in the Irish wake and showed him how to die too.
His dying, his wake, his willing sharing of his own death, would too be his last parental lesson to his children and his community. A gift.
The wake is among the oldest rites of humanity first cited in the great Homeric war poem the Iliad and commonly practised across Europe until the last 200 years. The final verses of the Iliad, the display of the Trojan prince Hector’s corpse, the wailing women, the feasting and the funeral games, are devoted to his wake. And such rituals would be easily recognisable to any wake-goer on the island today.
For our ancestors, a wake, with its weight of obligations between the living and the bodies of the dead, and the dead and living, was a pathway to restore natural order to the world, heal our mortal wound, and communally overcome the death of any one individual. An act, in our current, thin psychological jargon, of closure.
Through urbanisation, industrialisation and the medicalisation of death, the wake died away in most of the western world and death itself came to be silenced by what might be called the Western Death Machine. But out in the west, among the Celts, this ancient form of death sharing lives on.
When he was 70, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – still among the most fatal cancers among western men. Sonny never flinched. He did not want to die but when he knew he had no choice, he never wasted the time he had left. He wasn’t angry or embittered but something wiser – he accepted his death. He got on with his dying the same way as he had got on living, day by day, pressing forward, husbanding his energy.
Sonny’s time had come but neither he nor his community denied his impending death. Unlike the shunning of the Anglo-Saxon world, his house filled with visitors who came to see him because he was dying.
Dying is an exhausting, self-centring act. Sonny, always a powerful physically imposing man, rapidly shed powers like a snake shedding skin. His world shrank to two rooms and Sonny knew he would never see the end of that fateful summer.
Sonny’s fatherhood was ending and my own beginning. Our last words together on his deathbed were very ordinary, bland. “I’ll let you go, son,” he said as I left to return to the city. When I returned, he had lapsed into a coma and could no longer speak.
But our parting was fitting. There was no more mystery to share. No revelation to be uncovered. Our identities as father and son had already been written out in the deeds of our life together; Sonny changing my nappy, not losing his temper in my teenage contrariness, encouraging me in my education and the summers we shared on building sites when I worked alongside him while still a student. And in all the countless ways he showed me in his craft how to be a man and father myself.
Sonny died just before dawn on the longest day of the year at home in the village of ancestors. No one called for help, or the “authorities”. He was already home with us. His body was washed and prepared for his coffin by his daughter and sister-in-law. He was laid out in his own front sitting room in an open coffin as his grandchildren, three, five and nine, played at the coffin’s feet.
His community, his relatives, some strangers even, came in great numbers to pray at his side, feast, talk, gossip about sheep prices or the stock market, and openly mark his death in countless handshakes and “Sorry for your trouble” utterances.
We waked together through the night with Sonny’s corpse to guard the passage out for his departing soul and man the Gate of Chaos against Hades’ invading horde lest the supernatural world sought to invade the living world. Just as the Trojans too before us had watched over Hector’s corpse. A perpetual quorum; dying in each other’s lives and living on in each other’s deaths at every wake ever since.
It was blessing of a kind, an act of grace. We give ourselves, our mortal presence, in such death sharings, or we give nothing at all; all the rest of our powers, wealth, position, status, are useless.
To be truly human is to bear the burden of our own mortality and to strive, in grace, to help others carry theirs; sometimes lightly, sometimes courageously. In communally accepting death into our lives through the Irish wake we are all able to relearn the first and oldest lessons of humanity. How to be brave in irreversible sorrow. How to reach out to the dying, the dead and the bereaved. How to go on living no matter how great the rupture or loss. How to face your own.
And how, like Sonny, to teach your children to face their death too.
• My Father’s Wake by Kevin Toolis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
Friday, September 15, 2017
Lucy Lintott - documentary discussing living with Motor neurone disease at 22.
Deeply insightful, honest and reflective account of living with MND. Eye-opening. She has my respect.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0904xtm/mnd-and-22yearold-me
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0904xtm/mnd-and-22yearold-me
Cutting from Yahoo news re Grenfell
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/grenfell-residents-died-fleeing-top-floor-believing-rescued-095056746.html
'
Grenfell residents died after ‘fleeing to top floor believing they would be rescued’
Dozens of residents of Grenfell Tower are said to have fled to the top floor of the building believing they would be rescued – but none survived.
Flora Neda, who lived on the 23rd floor of the building, claimed residents said they were told to go to the top floor and wait for rescue by helicopter as the fire raged.
The 55-year-old told Channel 4 News: “35 or 40 people came up and they said the fire brigade told us you have to go up and we send for you helicopter rescue.”
She added: “One of the Iranian ladies (who took refuge in her flat) spoke to her (own) son who said that he wanted to come take her away.
“She replied that this was not necessary as the helicopter was coming to take them away.”
Mrs Neda’s son, Farhad, 24, does not believe residents were told they would be rescued on the top floor.
He told the programme: “I don’t think anyone was instructed to seek help from the helicopters.
“There were helicopters up. I’m not sure how many. There was definitely more than one.”
The London Fire Brigade also denied they they instructed residents to head to the top floor.
A spokeswoman said: “Grenfell fire was an unprecedented fire and due to the ongoing investigation we cannot go into details about what happened on the night.
“That said we can confirm that we do not use helicopters to conduct rescues from high rise tower fires.”
Mrs Neda arrived home with her son and husband Saber, 57, just 30 minutes before the fire started.
Mechanical engineering graduate Farhad said they were told firefighters were on their way up and to stay in their flats – before worried neighbours banged on doors to tell people to get out.
He said that when fire broke the windows of their flat and had come into the bedroom, his mother threatened to jump out of the tower, and told him: “I don’t want to burn. I don’t want to go through the pain of burning alive. I’m going to jump out the window.”
He said: “So I just grabbed my mum, so that she didn’t jump out the window, I pulled her. And I said ‘OK we need to at least try to get out’. We thought we were dead 100% that night. So I said ‘at least let’s try’.
“And at that point I grabbed my mum, and because there was so much smoke I didn’t let go of her. Because I knew that if I let go I wouldn’t be able to find her again. So I took her and we started feeling our way.
“She suffers from myasthenia gravis, which is a muscular condition. So I knew it would be difficult for her to go down stairs especially.
“So I was carrying her weight above on my shoulders and we just made our way out. And we literally couldn’t see anything. It was so difficult.”
Flora told Channel 4 News how she tried to persuade her husband to leave with them, saying: “I called to him so many times to keep away from the window. He was standing and watching the fire. And then my son took my hand and said ‘Mum you have to leave here’. I called my husband and said ‘let’s go’. He said ‘I’m behind you’.”
Mr Farhad ran down a stairwell through thick smoke, with his mother on his shoulders, and said: “We were stepping over people and she was asking me ‘what are we stepping on?’ and I didn’t want to scare her so I said ‘It’s just the fire brigade’s hoses that we’re stepping on.’”
The pair were then helped by firefighters, and were put into an induced coma in hospital.
Mr Farhad said he believes his father, who jumped from the building, stayed behind to help other neighbours.
He said: “I think he was trying to help the other neighbours who had come into our flat – the four ladies – to help them get out as well.
“He was always the type of person who would try to help other people before himself. I know that he wouldn’t have left anyone in there.”
The extraordinary story from inside the fire comes on the day that the public inquiry into the causes of the tragedy begins.
Chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the retired judge chosen by Prime Minister Theresa May to lead the inquiry, will give his opening address at the Grand Connaught Rooms in central London.
The former Court of Appeal judge will not take questions following the hearing, which is expected to last around 45 minutes.
Survivors and victims’ families will be able to watch live on a screen in Notting Hill Methodist Church, where they are likely to be listening intently to the language and tone of Sir Martin’s opening.
The chairman faced anger from the community in a series of public meetings designed to help shape the terms of reference but, once these were announced, the inquiry was criticised for excluding an examination of wider social housing policy.
Campaigners had pressed for the probe to scrutinise the systemic issues underlying the cause of the tragedy on June 14, when at least 80 people died. '
Wednesday, September 06, 2017
Primodos and disabilities - cutting from Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/new-evidence-pregancy-drug-hormone-birth-defects-primodos-thalidomide-compensation-yasmin-qureshi-a7637616.html
'New evidence links 1970s pregnancy test drug to life-changing birth defects
There may have been a 'cover-up' of the effect of the drug on pregnant mothers, say campaigners
- @niamh_mcintyre
- 1 comment
- New evidence has emerged linking the hormone-based drug Primodos to severe deformities or abnormalities in children, sparking fresh hope for families who have been campaigning for decades for compensation from its manufacturer.Primodos was a hormone-based pregnancy test which detected pregnancy by inducing menstruation in women who were not pregnant.A review by the Committee on Safety of Medicines in the 1970s concluded that the product should not be used by pregnant women.
- But despite the evidence, no successful prosecution has ever been brought against the drug’s manufacturer, Schering-Plough.A court case in 1982 collapsed after it was deemed unlikely that claimants could prove a direct causal link between Primodos and birth defects.The papers, which were unearthed in the Berlin National Archives, include a study by Professor William Inman, a medical officer for the British Government, who was an advocate for tighter pharmaceutical regulation after the Thalidomide scandal.The files show that Dr Inman had found that women who took a hormone pregnancy test were five times more likely to have a disabled child than those who did not take the drug.The research was passed to the manufacturing firm, but was later destroyed by Dr Inman to prevent legal claims against the company being “based on his material”.I've spent many years fighting for justice for the victims of #Primodos including getting an Inquiry set up to investigate this scandal twitter.com/SkyNews/status…Yasmin Qureshi, a Labour MP who has supported those campaigning for an investigation into the effects of Primodos, told The Daily Telegraph: “These documents form a significant discovery and could lead to important developments.“I believe there may have been a cover-up over the effect of this drug on pregnant mothers.”Marie Lyon, whose daughter Sarah was born with a foreshortened arm, believes the tablets stunted her development in the womb.
Ms Lyon, chair of the campaign group Association for Children Damaged by Hormone Pregnancy Tests, said: “It’s unthinkable that more than 40 years after our children were born, neither the sufferers nor their mothers have had justice.”
Schering-Plough has now been taken over by Bayer. The company has said the use of Primodos in the 1970s was “in compliance with prevailing laws”.
The pharmaceutical giant maintains the “evidence for a causal association between the use of hormonal pregnancy tests and an increased incidence of congenital malformations was extremely weak”.
Bayer “rejects any suggestion” that anything has been concealed by Schering-Plough, other than privileged documents.
A spokesperson for Bayer said:
“Bayer denies that Primodos was responsible for causing any deformities in children.
UK litigation in respect of Primodos, against Schering (which is now owned by Bayer), ended in 1982 when the claimants’ legal team, with the approval of the court, decided to discontinue the litigation on the grounds that there was no realistic possibility of showing that Primodos caused the congenital abnormalities alleged.
Since the discontinuation of the legal action in 1982, no new scientific knowledge has been produced which would call into question the validity of the previous assessment of there being no link between the use of Primodos and the occurrence of such congenital abnormalities.”
A spokesperson for Bayer said: "Bayer denies that Primodos was responsible for causing any deformities in children.
"UK litigation in respect of Primodos, against Schering (which is now owned by Bayer), ended in 1982 when the claimants’ legal team, with the approval of the court, decided to discontinue the litigation on the grounds that there was no realistic possibility of showing that Primodos caused the congenital abnormalities alleged.
"Since the discontinuation of the legal action in 1982, no new scientific knowledge has been produced which would call into question the validity of the previous assessment of there being no link between the use of Primodos and the occurrence of such congenital abnormalities.” '
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