I get down with a little help from my 'friends'

Individual freedom v collective responsibility

They told me I would have ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’. I am still at the point where I have ‘bad days’ and ‘not quite so bad days’. This is one of the latter.

I haven’t felt up to participating in social media but some of the posts that have been shared with me have been personally distressing and finally persuaded me to write this. Quite simply it is a request for a number of ‘friends’ to unfriend me.

I could simply have unfollowed them but I feel anyone so inclined to read this might just understand where I am coming from and, in future, just think a little more about what it is being said, advised and claimed. 

I’d like to stress these comments weren’t directly pointed at me, and that’s the issue. Broad-brush statements cover a lot of people. What one think is a generalisation can actually be deeply personal and hurtful.

The catalyst for this was really in the car park at the entrance to the Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy. My wife had met me at the door, carried my bag and helped me into the passenger seat of our car. As she put my holdall in the boot, shaking and emotional I watched this scene unfold in front of me.

There was a woman in a wheelchair, as fragile as a broken bird, met by her husband. With tears pouring down his face, he reached down to her, tenderly removed her face mask, scooped her up and gently eased her into the back seat of his vehicle.

It was enough to trigger my uncontrollable sobs as the trauma of the past few weeks washed over me, bringing with it the realisation of one of the cruellest aspects of the coronavirus pandemic – loneliness.

As I write this my medical journey is not over. After a cancer diagnosis, surgery, the follow-up test results, there was still the frank meeting with the oncologist, the chemotherapy strategy ahead and the sessions with the psychologists over post traumatic stress disorder that followed my last health crisis, a mental health condition exacerbated by events on my return to work.

Macmillan Cancer Support is running an advertisement just now about not facing cancer alone. The truth is Covid 19 has meant you almost do, and that goes for every health scare facing young and old. Briefings and statistics, and the odd colour piece on television or in the press, do not do justice to the isolation and distress Covid has brought to patients with other health conditions the length and breadth of the country. Every stage you are alone, and you only see eyes. You walk through doors and waiting rooms alone. There are no visitors in hospital; there are no faces, just your own thoughts and fears.

And social media has made a bad situation worse. It is fairly easy to avoid the nonsense strangers post but less so that from those purporting to be ‘friends’. I do believe one of the strengths of friendship is being able to hold differing views, to row and rage and have that actually reinforce your relationship. But, always, there must be consideration and understanding of each other’s position.

The last few months has seen those ground rules shattered. Back in spring there was actually hope that the so-called “new normal” would mean a more caring and compassionate society would emerge. Looking at the bitterness and divisions over the past few months, it feels to me we are fractured beyond repair.

Politicians and press have created a climate of displacement; a blame culture and a cauldron of conspiracies eagerly taken up by an army of amateur armchair experts.

My distress is caused because I am, and have been, at the centre of these conspiracies, all of which spin out of Covid 19. The pandemic is, of course, now seeing growing support as a 'con’, a ‘scamdemic’ as it has been dubbed.

There is no point going into any detail of the multifarious theories of the source of the virus, suffice to say I believe it is nonsense that this has barely claimed a single life. It is viewed by some conspiracy theorists as no more than a cold and affects so few people severely there is absolutely no point in protection or isolation. 

Those that do die a horrible, lonely death simply got what was coming to them via Mother Nature’s routine harvest. They are simply a statistic and being tagged with the Covid 19 label to reinforce the aims of a communist cabal of paedophiles to impose a level of social control that will take from the most vulnerable and give to the powerful and wealthy. That has to be one of the most bizarre interpretations of socialism, topped only by the claim that the virus was released by a ‘secret’ Soviet Union, so evil and corrupt that even Russia now has nothing to do with it.

The claims depict a global mind-control network. According to QAnon, only President Donald Trump, hailed as God’s chosen new Messiah, has the power to wage a righteous war to save us from those left wing, big business supporting, child abusers.

And this skewed mix of half truths, fiction and falsehoods, has made myself and my family targets.

Firstly, there are, it is claimed, doctors, nurses and care workers, all party to this global conspiracy. They are concealing that Covid 19 is nothing more than a minor ailment. We have family and friends who have been in the front line; people who have witnessed tragedies they never imagined. To ridicule them for spreading a lie by broadcasting that what they have seen is nothing more than the common cold is a vicious insult. The conclusion is that our family and friends have only played to the gallery through those gruelling months; grandstanding for what? To support a corrupt cabal? In the hope to entice more people out on to the doorstep to bang saucepans? These people are tired and near broken; my family and friends are not phonies and part of a conspiratorial plot. I won’t have then vilified. Unfriend me.

Secondly, it has been circulated widely that the death rate from the virus is so low as to be insignificant. Those that have succumbed would have had underlying health conditions. So, thanks to some ‘friends’ I now know my mother simply got her just desserts. She was a good age and, in the height of summer, having been given a clean bill of health, respiratory failure and pneumonia was maybe totally unexpected for her, staff and doctors, but not for those armchair experts. That doesn’t make her begging for help and gasping for breath in a lonely and terrifying death any easier to erase from my memory. For that cold, callous and cruel conclusion, unfriend me.

Finally, and this is really personal, there is the ditch your face mask call. I’ve read the posts about it being everyone’s legal and human right to breathe the air freely and we all should challenge the authorities, be they political or medical, and abandon this irritating protection. That argument is only half correct. I would say it is everyone’s right to freely inhale, it becomes a lot more complicated when it comes to exhalation. Take a more tangible example. It is everyone’s right to buy weedkiller and drink it; you don’t have the right to force others to share your poison.

While I don’t have a problem with those proudly bragging about filling their house with friends, abandoning social distancing and having a jolly good time because life is too short to worry about tomorrow – I do have a problem with all of them then venturing out into the wider community.

Those, like myself, embarking on a chemotherapy programme, as well as those suffering from many other life threatening conditions, are vulnerable and contracting Covid 19 could prove fatal. I know the armchair experts say that is nonsense, but the consultants say otherwise. For those in robust health, maybe life is too short to worry about tomorrow, but spare a thought for those who desperately want to see a tomorrow.

Please think of that poor lady being gently lifted into her husband’s car and show some respect for their need to value, and safeguard, whatever time they may have together.

And please, unfriend me.