Lest We Forget – November 2019

My son has ASD and spent a year out of school due to unofficial exclusion by the mainstream school that he had been attending. As a result, our family was placed under immense stress and financial tension as we had to fund childcare to enable me – a brain-injury survivor medicated for depression – to do the things that enable me to function mentally, physically and emotionally. We funded this out of my DLA and my mother’s old-age pension. I now seek to recover those funds, plus compensation for the distress caused to my son and myself.
My son is now at a wonderful school and, I hope, settling in well. Now I am able to get my life back together again, and this is great, except that I need to emphasise that there are THOUSANDS more families being failed. We got no support from social services or the local authority; I was left to cope largely alone (except for my mother, thankfully, who gave us as much support as she could), and the things that enable me to live my best life continue to be the strategies that I found most helpful when the going was at its toughest: I go to the gym.
After my brain injury, my difficulties with hormones have been exacerbated, and my underlying depression magnifies to such a degree that, without the medication that I have been prescribed for the last three years, I have been unable to function. This really came home to me this morning, when I arrived at the gym and Sam, a fellow TBI survivor, said to me, “We forget most things, but we get to the gym.” Forgetfulness for me is not a problem, but coping remains my daily agenda, and I do this best when I engage in proprioceptive (effortful) activity.
The task remains for me to recover the funding that I lost through the local authority’s utter disregard of my son’s legal rights and my difficulties under pressure. Thus, I care not one jot for Brexit, because this country is failing its own people day after day, month after month, and year after year. While over-privileged tossers attempt to wrestle with the Irish Border Question in an endless clusterfuck, my son and I and our wider family are still trying to recover.
I consider frequently the possibility of a tattoo of a sun on my left (jab) hand, and a rainbow on my right (cross) hand. Those who are familiar with Rocky Balboa’s incredible, eloquent speech will understand.