The four pillars of courage during lockdown

It has taken me six weeks to write this article. Back in February I was struggling to breathe. It wasn't the creaky wheezy asthma that I often get, but rather the lack of breath that wears you down slowly without you realising it is happening. I had not experienced this since my penultimate undergraduate year, when months after a bout of 'flu had truncated my teaching placement during a snowy January, a deep lung infection had me wondering if I was close to death. Luckily this year, my annual asthma revue revealed it to my conscious mind sooner, and a short course of oral steroids followed by antibiotics and then more, set me on a prolonged course to recovery.

It was at this point that the world turned upside down and all of a sudden nobody was going out. Being on oral steroids and being asplenic, (it was removed at the age of 16 due to hereditary spherocytosis) I believed I probably was very vulnerable. After all the two likely underlying health conditions of compromised breathing and overwhelming post splenectomy infection (or sepsis) seemed to make it an almost certainty, as I sat at home listening to the doom sayers of the media. However the statisticians seemed to disagree. The degree of vulnerabilty of individuals in any given population is determined by the number of similar people observed being negatively affected before. As this virus is in its infancy, the time to observe, record and analyse those who are likely to be the most vulnerable is a complicated business. The line between vulnerable and the most vulnerable had to be drawn. Shielding was going to be an intensive and economically draining category for the nation, so only the most vulnerable could be included.

However living with vulnerability is not a statistical exercise. It has implications for the individual and all those around them. The official line was that the government was aware shielding was going to be a hard, which was why they did not start it too early. For those of us who believed we probably needed to shield, starting this later seemed to be non-sensical. If you were very likely to be badly affected by being exposed to the virus, then removing yourself from its path was not something you could put off until later. So withdrawing from close physical contact from anyone, including household members had to be organised.

This is where trust plays a big part in all forms of vulnerability. Nobody is completely self sufficient, but the more vulnerable you are, the more you have to trust in the goodness of others. If you rely on the actions of those around you and most of their actions are outside your personal scope of observation, you have to trust that they are acting in a way that will not put you at risk. I was very fortunate that the pandemic occurred in the year that my two children became newly fledged adults. My son, a school leaver at the age of 18, is able to drive, and my daughter in the last year of her degree, was able to migrate north as soon as the Chichester campus closed - her degree in Acting for Film lending itself to assessment through remotely filmed self tapes, better than many undergraduate examinations. As neither of them have their future concretely mapped out, they have both entered a form of young adult carer gap year scenario, where they shop, cook and drive my husband to medical appointments, whilst I remain in self confinement. I trust that they disinfect, socially distance and reduce their interaction when they leave home, but I have no real choice, as I am dependent upon them. I fully understand why disabled people are not at all sympathetic to individuals embracing the "new normal", which for them has been normality all along. The vulnerable have to trust that the rest of society will be mindful, will understand and will care enough not to expose them to further danger as they are dependent on them for survival.

So what of clarity of values? This existence in lockdown has given us lots of time to consider exactly what we really consider to be important. The phrase "save our NHS" soon became supplanted by "clap for carers", when the emphasis moved from the system to the individuals within it. Yes, most of us value our NHS, especially if we have needed it for emergency or life or death, healing situations; as we know it does not depend on our ability to pay, no matter how expensive the procedure or treatment. However, it is the people who work within the NHS as well as the caring and other key workers, that we value more than the high tech equipment or expensive medications. Without them there would be no system and in this time of crisis we are well aware that these individuals are very often risking their own health and wellbeing to care for the rest of us. Those of us with friends and relatives in these positions, know only too well the courage it takes for them to do their jobs. We are all guiltily aware that most of them have hitherto been described as "low skilled" and are amongst the lowest paid in the land. The country itself has become vulnerable by not recognising the vital role that all these key workers play, and it is interesting to note that some of the most vulnerable individuals have been the ones who have been most keen not to overburden the limited resources that the NHS has and in doing so have now been encouraged by those in charge to come forward with their heart, stroke and cancer symptoms. These were not the ones that had been thought of when we were all told to act to save the NHS. It is those who are less vulnerable, who have never been or seen anyone seriously ill, that flaunt the rules and refuse to be locked down without really understanding how their actions impact on others. For some realisation will come too late, when their actions wipe out more vulnerable members of their friends and family, and all they have left is regrets. It is that awareness that prevents my son from taking a job alongside his mates, collecting supermarket trolleys and supervising sanitation stations at the local supermarket. He knows he could be making good money and occupying some of his time, now the recruitment of modern apprentices has been postponed indefinitely. However to take on one of these roles, would be to expose him, and therefore my household, to much greater risk and my vulnerability trumps his economic benefit. He cares too much to put me in harm's way.

So lastly rising skills - what of that? We know that a health crisis can be a catalyst for many scientific breakthroughs and feats of engineering. However for the vulnerable at home the rising skills are likely to be more personal rather than historical. Interpersonal communication is the major development for many of us living in seclusion. For teachers like me, it is remote learning that we are striving to get our heads around, and then having done that for ourselves; sought to encourage our young learners and their families to engage and develop. I am finding ways to encourage my S3 cohort to realise we can still work together with The Wood Foundation to support local charities to do the front line caring and they are so skilled at doing. Using the power of collaborative digital skills they hopefully can create impassioned pitches for a ￡4000 philanthropic money pot. It is a challenge when you live geographically distant from the school's local community but I will try.

The ability to video conference with my parents has been key for my mental health, as I have been able to daily contact both of them in their New Forest cottage and talked my mother through learning ICT skills such as printing pictures from her laptop with her new printer, via the newly installed Portal, so that she can continue crafting; whilst my nonogenarian father continues to walk around their garden, in splendid isolation, because he too is asplenic and should shield from others taking their dogs for a walk down the lane. Unlike me, who at last, received my official letter today, telling me to shield until at least 8th June, my father has not yet been informed. "Its not like I've got anywhere to go anyway" he commented tonight. Its true, we have just said goodbye to our deposit on a joint family celebratory cruise to the Canaries in July. Even if the boat was to set sail as planned, we would not be able to afford the travel insurance, given the number of medical conditions we all live with. So the milestone birthdays, graduations and my husband's third anniversary of living with stage 4 cancer will have to be recognised in some other way. One thing I have noticed about the resilience of vulnerable people is their ability to trust it will all resolve itself in the end. We will come through this and life will return to a time when the trivial becomes the major issue of the day. You just need courage to believe that a focus on what is really valuable, enables us to develop the skills to protect all the vulnerabilities that we have been neglected for too long.