By Emily Writes: For Complete Post, click here…
There was a period of almost a year when our eldest son wasn’t “vulnerable”. He’d recovered well from the latest surgery, his fourth or fifth since he was born, and he had managed to struggle through a common cold without hospitalisation. Life, had finally become normal for us.
He went to school. He loved it. He built an enormous group of friends, discovered a love of cross-country, started learning to surf, and began swimming. He had his birthday party at the pool – that would have been unthinkable the year before.
He had playdates and his first sleepover. He was six. For the first time in a long time we didn’t have to hold our breath.
Then he caught a tummy bug. Then he fell into a coma. He spent three weeks in hospital and was diagnosed with type one diabetes. He did not return to school for two months. When he did – it was for half-days.
David Seymour has a plan for Covid 19 apparently. He says: “We can’t keep living with the uncertainty that we could be locked down again at any moment.” This is a bitterly funny comment to parents and caregivers who constantly live in uncertainty. (I started a new job and two days later, my son was in hospital for weeks).
It won’t surprise you that Seymour’s plan involves the isolation of the “medically vulnerable”. It involves pushing children like Eddie back inside, into an endless bubble from which they can never escape from, because their mental health and their worth is apparently of little value.
“Children are anxious about missing school”, Seymour says, apparently discounting the hundreds of thousands of disabled and medically fragile children who would be removed from school completely if we were to only isolate the medically vulnerable.
“Medical operations are being deferred”, he says, without considering how we are meant to cope when we take our medically fragile children to hospital and ICU beds are full. Will my child be worthy of an ICU bed? Will his life be worth saving?
