This morning is cooler outside than it is within our house, I have opened the window as instructed. We , like most British households, do not have air-conditioning and I paid a price for that on Monday.
I arrived back from the swimming pool at Windsor on foot. I’d swum 1.5km and walked a mile or two but had enjoyed the beautiful lunchtime weather.
Then I collapsed, had a seizure and the next thing I knew I had an ambulances car outside and three members of the NHS emergency crew around me. I was one of the thousands of call outs on Monday to people who had triggered latent problems by exercising regardless of the consequences. Perhaps people like me should grow up, we are no longer young enough to take chances.
There is no recovery from growing old!
I recovered and refused a trip to the hospital having been in A&E for 24 hours (well in a corridor to be accurate).
This goes back to nearly two years ago when I got knocked over the handlebars of my bike and landed on my head on Southwark Bridge Road.
I’ve come down to Windsor where my partner has a place to get an easier summer. This got off to a bad start when I choked on phlegm coming out the pool and across the car park. I got the phlegm down the grating of a drain and thought I’d done pretty well not to have made a state of myself (no one was there I thought).
It’s a tough place – Windsor – if you are on foot, if you have no protection of a car when these things happen. It’s you and the drain!
I was spotted by two Windsor and Maidenhead officers looking for litterers and fined £500 for breaking a law. It was a Fixed Penalty Notice. I had just paid the penalty having appealed it and my anxiety this weekend has been about the incapacity I have from neurological issues. Neurological impediments don’t seem to be a problem by council officers!
Let me not overdo this. I am typing like I usually do in the morning and seem to have recovered. But I wonder how much understanding there is of the issues people have when they lose the use of their brain as you do when you have a brain haemorrhage.
I wonder whether we really want older people being independent. In the case of the NHS I was brilliantly treated because I was in physical danger and acting the part of an older person. In the case of my choking in the car park, I was a vagrant littering a car park used by motorists.
The problem with sudden heat
We have had the kind of problem we only normally encounter when on holiday. There , there is typically an air conditioned indoors and we are prepared for what we are taking on.
Part of the problem has been , with this week’s heat is that it is “still spring” and our brains as well as our bodies are ill-conditioned to what is coming our way.
My guess is that this kind of “exception to the rule” will become more common and we will have to accommodate the climate as Australians do. The alternative is more of the same, we will see greater strain on our healthcare, greater angst between authorities and those caught short as their bodies do not cope (I bracket my seizure with my choking in the car park).
We need places where we can be safe and understood. Officials must recognise that age has its downside, that bodies do not last as young ones do. Housebuilders must start thinking of houses with air conditioning and we must have education about the dangers of a climate we have waited till holidays to have.
In short we must recognise the dangers of heat to constitution, especially among the old!