The dance coronavirus is taking us on is relentless and exhausting

What a terrible dance the coronavirus is leading us on. It’s the ultimate one step forward, two steps back routine that wears you out and gets you absolutely nowhere. 

Imagine it danced to something like the creepy theme tune from The Third Man. A haunting kind of melody, that goes silent for a while before starting up again, quietly at first and then louder and louder, reminding us that we aren’t in charge, our government is clueless and we are nowhere near finding a safe vaccine.

That we should be living in such awful times is sometimes too bewildering to contemplate and the fact we can never truly relax is exhausting.

Last week, just as it started to feel a tiny bit normal – with kids back on the street in school uniform, swinging bags and laughing in the September sunshine – the virus stats started climbing and the Covid-19 dance music cranked up again: “Ladies and gentlemen, take your partners we’re about to go back to square one.”

This time around, the prospect of a new set of restrictions feels even tougher, because in the six months since the virus first reared it’s ugly head, so much damage has already been done. This thing has affected us all, be it financially, emotionally or physically.

Last week the true extent of the pandemic was brought home very rudely when my mother fell outside her flat 250 miles away.

She didn’t tell us, she kept quiet, she had a taxi booked to pick her up in a couple of days’ time to take her on a little holiday to see an old army friend. Her bag was packed and she certainly wasn’t going to hospital like the nice paramedics asked her to do.

This is partly our fault, her three children had warned her ever since lockdown began in March to be careful – “the last thing anyone wants is for you to end up in A&E” – so she decided she wouldn’t go and wriggled out of the system.

Having spent several days up north dealing with the aftermath of this incident, some of the more insidious side effects of how the virus has affected the older community have become all too apparent.

There is a vicious circle element to Covid-19, nobody is entirely to blame for anything and so the buck gets passed around.

At the beginning of the year, it became obvious to us that my mother needed a visit from an occupational therapist; her right leg, badly affected by polio seventy-odd years ago, was showing signs of further weakening, she was unsteady on her caliper around the house and reluctant to always use her stick or walker. 

I spoke to her GP about this and she was referred to the relevant unit. Two months later, just as someone was assigned to visit her, Covid-19 struck and home visits were off limits.

As we all know, in life the big emergencies usually start with something small and there must be hundreds of thousands of households across the country who are now suffering the consequences of missed check-ups, delayed procedures and backed-up referrals. Just as we have been warned there is an economic timebomb about to blow up in our faces, the same can be said of a massive impending crisis in the country’s mental and physical health and I think many of us are realising that you don’t need to catch the disease to die of it.

In my mother’s case, once alerted to the situation, my sister, daughter and I drove north and moved in with her. “We can do this,” we thought. Wrong – within days of acting as carers, the three of us on were our knees, wiped out by the stress and anxiety of trying to keep someone safe in their own home. 

To be honest, it wasn’t looking after June that was the problem, it was all the other stuff, the automated answers to calls made to various social services, offering directions to impenetrable websites, the form-filling and legal documents, the constant kettle-boiling, the sheer relentlessness of it all.  

Fortunately things were eventually taken out of our clumsy untrained hands when the matron of a local nursing home, in full PPE, gave my mother a Covid-19 test on the sofa and offered a her a few weeks respite care in the same place that looked after my father.

Our relief and gratitude is immeasurable and even if this is a temporary solution we know how lucky we are, as it gives us breathing space to plot our next move.  

Of course what we had forgotten in the drama of everything was that we wouldn’t be able to settle my mother into her bedroom, to hang up her clothes and put her nightie under her pillow. We had to say goodbye at the front door of the nursing home, which has been virus-free since March. My mother was accompanied by the same case she had packed to visit her friend. 

Seriously, this pandemic really knows how to hit where it hurts.