Living With Gladys Full Time

Well, its been a funny past few days and not in a hilarious way!

As you know we had a recent visit to the hand puppet who, at Alistairs request, referred us to Macmillan, from Alistairs point of view to make contact and maybe get some external  support and  from the hand puppets point of view to get him assessed and out of her hair!

Well, things certainly got moving then, although not from Macmillan but from the local St Francis Hospice triage team ( I know it seems like death in a sentence doesn’t it)! I have to say though, what a lovely team of nursing professionals.

We had an hour long meeting with their consultant and their clinical nurse specialist (who turned out to be someone I knew extremely well from a long time ago- synchronicity at its best)! What a pleasure in a most surreal way. They entertained our non regard of all things allopathic very well and the consultant is even trying to get our hand puppet to refer us to the homeopathic hospital in London- good luck with that Vinny- she referred us to the job centre last week!

You can breath a sigh of relief everyone, the hospice don’t want to take Alistair, not even as an out patient. And sadly for us and others like us who tread the wonderful but little understood non mainstream alternative healing path there was no likeminded support group or specialist practitioner that Alistair could natter to. They certainly did make available their family support group which offers as many appointments as you would like with a counsellor, psychologist and or social worker. I grimaced inwardly whilst still retaining the grateful smile at the thought of  Alistair, the Master therapist in the hands of another, I shall go no further, those that know him well will already be bent double with the implausibility of that scenario!

But, how lovely that this resource is there for those who would benefit from it. And the hospice had a professional, caring, supportive feel to it. In fact it was the same place where my lovely late Father in Law from my first marriage died and where Pippin, as a baby, was Christened by his bed side so the visit woke up some old and strangely fond memories for me. In this nearly whole year of the ‘curve ball’ experience, the St Francis Hospice team have been a model of excellence and had we had that support and attention from the start Alistairs journey would have been made a lot easier Im sure.

And you know, I am at pains to make clear that we have  great respect for the work that this charity does and neither of us disrespect what they do. We may wish that they also were able to offer more extensive choice, but, alas they are bound by the medical model . Its quite simply that what they do does not match with the colour of the thread that we are using to weave our tapestry. Although perhaps a couple of shades (not grey) around the periphery may fit (we are on a waiting list for Reiki and Massage for free at the hospice)

We did wonder, after our meeting, what  nurse specialist Chris and consultant Vinny (how lovely that they use first names) made of us two. We wondered if they thought we were a couple of idiots, curtailing Alistairs life span by not taking the offerings that medicine has to offer (a friend of mine is a very lovely Professor of stem cell research and such like, who certainly does think we are ‘fucking idiots’). We wondered if they were, in the quiet of their own minds, righting us off as a couple of loons desperate to find our own holy grail and yet likely to fail. Who knows? Neither of them outwardly showed that and I did feel for the first time in nearly a year that someone was trying to understand us and help us.

We popped into the hand puppet today to pick up the full blood test results, and lo and behold, she is willing to make a special referral to the London Hospital of Homeopathy for Alistair! She didn’t though throw somersaults or ask what on earth we had been doing to help the PSA reading to reduce by a third, but perhaps we expect too much.

These visits have come about because apart from me and one or two others there isn’t really anybody for Alistair to really talk to about the path that he is walking, nobody on a professional level to check in with and I think he was feeling a little alone with it all. Im not sure how the events of the past few days have helped except to reaffirm that if y0u go against the medical model you are really on your own. I think we both feel that we need to start our own support group for people healing from cancer using alternative approaches, so that their voices can be heard, their ideas really be listened to and their results really heralded as confirmation that they are going in the right direction with their healing . Perhaps thats the next step…