Thread by @AliceCoote

I just got home from a week trying to learn and sing an
opera role in a new version and language, utterly shattered. I sang 23 hours Monday to Friday. I am back in my parents house every day (when I am not away rehearsing or performing) where there is now only my mother. My

Sister Stella and I were there 24/7 -as we are now -all way through lock down until my fathers death from dementia. I have been living like this since Feb 2015 when my mother collapsed with a massive stroke. My sister and I have had no holiday, no break, no unbroken nights sleep,

and most days a week we are up several times a night.
My poor mother who is paralysed on one side and almost blind is fully here mentally, but that is cruel in itself. We simply will not abandon her to strangers, leaving the house she built herself : she would be terrified. My

nerves and my emotional and mental well being is as broken as hers, as I live her devastation in my body and soul, every day. Sometimes we laugh nearly until we can't take another breath. But at the same time every day new strength to has to be found, sought out, dug up from a

far corner of yourself. My sister -left her job -copes alone with a few hours in the morning of inconsistent help from outside.
In the UK the level of care or respite care for the elderly during these past years is as useless & pointless as it can be criminally bad :

it is utterly inconsistent/ absent unreliable/ shockingly inadequate. I could write a book.

Taking my mother back to bed on the metal body mover from the commode just now she got very upset which isn't unusual. The emotion this specific marathon of suffering, adding old age, needs to come out somehow . Sometimes

it's almost a silent scream. Sometimes she just has to inconsolably cry. I try to make her laugh while she cries. Sometimes it works.
There is no way to describe what it's like being a carer 24/7 emotionally and mentally (never mind physically)

for years, with no real help because society actually provides no real support.
If you meet me..Please know that I am never fully there with you any more. Doing palliative and or ongoing care for so many years makes me very fragile, but angry too, also intolerant of people not

giving their all when I need them to . .Sometimes I get more than a little impatient with the world. I see life now from a very different perspective. It's based in the grim but sober reality of age, of death, and that this is where most of us are headed . But unlike my mother

(who is actually a lucky one can you believe ) we will be mostly be alone . We and our families are at the mercy of a society that ignores this epidemic of a failure to care for our older selves happening in plain sight. Won't pay a tax that will look after us all.
In the coming

decades any of us will be lucky to have the care my sister and are giving. I am afraid for you all .There is literally nowhere to turn, believe me. The system is broken.
#care #carecrisis #NHS @CarersTrust @CarersUK @NHSImprovement @NHSuk
bbc.com/news/uk-631605…