Saturday, October 24, 2015

'mustn't grumble'.......why not?

Is it particularly Irish to hold back and not grumble?
What is so awful about saying it as it really is?

If it is not like this, then you wouldn't need to grumble because then there would be nothing to grumble about.
therefore, Grumbling is, usually 'voicing a truth no one wants to hear'  rather than 'grumbling over nothing.'

A funny thing also about 'grumbling' those who 'grumble' are reminded by others, of the dying, the starving, the homeless and the cripples.
That is so you put things in perspective.
But 'Grumbling' is relative, as are levels of 'grumbles' and where one 'grumbles' and about what.

to me, as a person who has a strong social conscience, who hates crookery, deprivation, injustice and cruelty i still have issues.  I want to 'grumble.'
And why?
Because simply put we all have 'issues'  and some 'issues' are worse than others, but remain a grumbling troubling boil - on the bum-er of life itself.

Grumbling IS fair.
its not fair to compare for instance, pain which is caused by disease as against pain which is caused by a snapped spinal cord injury.
Has anyone ever heard this one 'now you would have something to grumble about if you were "Joe Blogs, he can't get out of a wheelchair."
Maybe he cannot.
I am not saying he is having the life of fun, hilarity and is anyway joyful he cannot get out of a wheelchair.  i think its fecking awful he cannot, but maybe he might see it differently, he might say he is bloody lucky not to be dead.
That's the difference.  We cannot presume someone is actually worse off.

therefore we also have to say the levels of grumbles are as variable as there are different continents on the planet and different ways of living and the troubles relative to the different people on the planet.
no two will be the same.
So end of lecture and the beginning of my grumble.

To me its a pretty big grumble.
I am profoundly depressed about it and i mean it.  I can say this in a depressing announcement or i can say it in a quirky way.
it doesn't really matter, hence the way one says it doesn't determine how bad it is.

to me to be honest i am falling apart at the seams.
I am telling my listeners what place i was in and how my life is panning out.  A decade ago it all began.
It wasn't that brilliant, but then i don't think any person has it plain sailing.
It certainly wasn't as traumatic as i am finding it now.
it was my home, my community, it meant the world to me
I was then settled in more ways than one.
i was happier than i was say, growing up. I was happier than I was when I tried and failed to work in the normal sense of the word.   I was as happy as I could be given the circumstances I found myself in.  I was in a real community that bothered and i bothered about them.   A lot.
I felt safe, I felt also needed and i felt  held by my community.

I didn't have a family, I knew really they didn't care, but did I need it (i did actually but even today I know that this may be a bit unrealistic though I need them more than ever), i don't think they are going to actually be there for me.
but i was happy then.
a new laptop awarded by the ADF which attempted to have me continue being creative.  It did until some eggit in the HSE decided i needed to move away from a place I loved
i got very unwell.
here is the biggest grumble on the planet.
i got so unwell i was using a wheelchair and a mobility scooter more and more, and i was languishing horizontal more then ever and the studio was gone and my painting days were over.

my older sister had died some ten years prior to this and my dad left me a tiny town house in a posh side of town, but why move when i felt really good in the secure community i was in.  It was also owned by my twin, who had her rights on this as well.
mags, my twin sister, when she was not yet unwell at the time, helped me decorate the home i loved when i lost my studio and became so very depressed about it all
but what happened next was like something out of a horror film.
there are two very large organisations in Ireland, both state funded therefore state er, funded.
the county council and the HSE.
Which is worse is anyone guess but definitely they have a very 'Irish thing' in common.
Responsibility and 'ownership of mistakes' isn't high on their agenda.

What happened next shouldn't have happened.
The person writing this blog wasn't in social housing for nothing.
I come from a rich and well educated family, so if i too am educated...and i am, it goes without saying that something must have happened.
we use the term in this little country as well, 'down on her luck'  but it was more than that.
i crashed out of living and life, i wasn't able for it.  i was drowning in society and now i understand why even if i didn't then.
so I became so unwell I nearly fecking died on the stairs of this social housing unit.
They were becoming too much for me.
Ending in hospital three times had the OT persuading me that my life wasn't worth living if i could be dead in the morning from them stairs.
Well that's fine i suppose and not a bad notion, in theory, that i could have been dead on them stairs, one poor man was and did die on them stairs across the way.
a 'unit' (that's what a home that is given by the state is called here, a unit ffs.)  came free downstairs.
it was similar to the one i had upstairs, so i didn't see it as much of an issue to move downstairs and ask to move downstairs.
well the council thought it a very big deal actually.
i seem to need AIR but this was before i knew why, i had developed Primary Sjogrens Syndrome, the first of a long list of ailments i went on to develop and Ireland left me to rot.  i had to leave the country to get this diagnosis and others.
they saw it as a big issue.
despite three consultants in medicine reminding the council and the HSE that  I would not deal well with change and  not to move me from a community i felt good and secure in and that my needs were such that i shouldn't be moved away from it.
well sod the consultants says the council, more or less because the did sod the consultants and moved me anyway.

I always loved nature, plants and always wanted a garden, but not at great expense, which was proven to be the case.  Sunflowers never thrived here with the cars and their fumes.  you have to give me some marks and them too for even trying.
and where was the HSE, well they were no where to be seen, they were once begging the council to leave me on the street i loved after that then they left me to it.

it played out like a bad dream.
it was a bad dream, far too bad.

I found myself alone, very alone.
There was  no one helping me move downstairs at all so much so i was shifted out of the area altogether.   Not only that i was shifted to an area which was all male.  I was a vulnerable woman, single, once sexually abused by a cleric was being moved there while most of the little vulnerable children were moved out.
so what is the difference between threat to a child and threat to an incapacitated woman in an enclave of alcoholic men i say?
well either could be dead, from any manner of issues.
i was dead really because as soon as i got there i was dead.

Finally i was shot at.
So the council says to the HSE that 'we didn't manage this well,'  like bloody hell they didn't.
the HSE said 'we am distressed by all of this.'
One thing though neither found it their place to shift me out of there once i was shot at.
oh and I have the evidence of a gun slinger on the wall, for i didn't know what was happening as i am very deaf except i was being harassed.   Up went my camera and i shot her.  Yep it was a girl gun slinger.

I hit her between the eyes.
she was a lousy shot for she left five bullets around my swing seat and two more by the back door.
I was target practise i suppose.
I wasn't dead but i wasn't staying there either.

so i got nine points  and put back on the list for rehousing.
i was told by another HSE OT that i would be dead before they would find me a place to live.
losing the garden but i had lost my soul so what did i care right at that point
when a neighbour said i would never be able to grow anything, that the kids would rip em all up.  They didn't. They had great respect for me, i loved them.   I left presents for each child that i grew to love and they who loved me. why did they not rip up all my plants and cause me that harm?  These were younger but when i left a large table out which wouldn't fit into this new place they battered it to bits.  So angered was I, I went to every home in that cul de sac and demanded the kids write an apology and bring it to my door within 24hrs.  They never thrashed another thing belonging to me again. 
so i felt i didn't want to be dead before that.
we sold the small town house and after all my life living in one county sick, depleted, stressed to the point of a nervous breakdown i moved to a different county.
Yes, there is a human being on this sofa, its my twin, now with a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, she was living at that time in the house we owned but we had to sell this.  she had no where to live until we both found a home.  She spent eight months on my sofa and it was a small sofa.  There was 'Family' who could have put her up, if they cared.
well no it didn't end here.
well its as if i am withering under the weight of depression, isolation, distress and despair.

but i know not a sod person cares a shit  i was left to it all.  There wasn't a lot i could have done.
So now i am here in this county.
No it doesn't end there because this county's HSE got at me.
I kid you not i have been very unfortunate.

name calling comes to mind, some very suspect stuff put on my medical files and no answers at all but more stress and strain from an organisation that i loathe now with all my might.
i think, well, what i think of the HSE is very evil  and dark thoughts indeed.

yes, there are some nice people within the organisation, but the organisation has one god and that is the organisation itself.
it doesn't really matter if its about people, the Irish people's health which they are all about.
Most forgot that part long ago, including this Government who cite Article 18 section something as to why they cannot get involved with the hokery pokery that is going on with a lot of sad and stressed and diseased and disabled ill in this small land.
Its not their problem according to them.
But then so too is it not the HSE problem, nor the council?

well its someones problem because once i was happy and now i am not.
Not only that, i am miles away from all i know and in the middle of the sticks, with no friends or even one person i know.
i am too sick really to start all over again and i miss my old life.
the life the consultants told them that i would not be able to leave and they are right.
so I am now in the life that the consultants said to them, both the HSE and the council that i wouldn't be able to adjust to.
I am not and i havent, they were right so.
that's my grumble.  i am sticking to it.
its a big one for me.
if i am now angry as well, who could blame me.

the grumble is this.
there isn't one single glorious thing i can think of that is relevant to this country, the state operatives, and the HSE.
there is one person who is also suffering, and partly because i am suffering and partly because she wasn't dealt a great hand once she met the HSE after the NHS, which to her and my eyes is a damn sight more civilised than the HSE.
i rest my case.
Ah, i will end on a better note, after well over two centuries we have or are about to get rid of the Lunacy act, i kid you not.   Many are incredulous about this one too, that it took so long!  They call it 'an embarrassment.'
Yep, we still have lunatics here in Ireland but we shall be getting rid of the lunatics soon.
 unfortunately not the ones in the HSE or the Government.  But those who are lunatic through no fault of their own shall be decently called what they always should have been called long ago, human beings who just happen to be learning disabled or mentally ill.
Not lunatics at all, now or ever but its taken us all this time to scrap a constitutional law they didn't know how to go about scrapping, until two centuries later, they couldn't wrap their little brains around that one so how on earth could they cope with little Ann eh?
god forbid how could they?

You could have said the same about me at the same place at the same time.  'Do not move'
we left -
but arrived at a new type of hell, with the same hell from the HSE, but even that was in complete contrast to the old type of hell. one more innocent. This kind definitely not innocent.



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