Daughter at her wits end!

Sorry, tried to make a sensible comment but am so incensed that sil thinks he can lock himself away like that I can't articulate.

Really? Surprised is not the word I’d use here, how can anyone be that stupid to abandon all caution to the wind to hug their DC and DGC? I’m not against sitting at the appropriate distance in a garden for an hour, taking your own drink and not using the loo BUT it seems as most on here have lost all sense of perspective which shows how selfish they are. If they don’t care if they catch it/pass on to family members others do. I am completely gobsmacked at the sheer ignorance ?

Justwokeup, your phrase ‘there can never be ‘one size fits all’ is so true. I am just surprised and upset at how judgemental some people on this forum can be about someone elses situation. Nice to hear a balanced view for a change!

this new phrase "the new normal". I find myself screaming inside when I hear it. I think it's one of the most manipulative phrases I have heard. That, plus the way we are addressed as though we are all 5 years old...
I completely agree Tillybelle, there are days when all this feels like a huge social experiment to me. This is definitely not any type of normal. Not sure where you are situated though Tillybelle - our local care homes are using PPE, and it is often the stated wish of residents themselves not to go to hospital. Sadly by the time a care home is required, statistics show residents are often very near the end of life. Illnesses of all sorts attack the weak and infirm, particularly in such a large family group as a care home.
I'm not sure of the rules in Scotland Sophiasnana but I think all the differences in opinion mainly relate to how everyone interprets the 'rules' in relation to their own situation, when they can never be one size fits all. I believe though that throughout the lockdown it has always been allowed that people can break lockdown to provide emergency care. You feel your daughter and DGC require care, if they agree with you being there, you can visit. I don't see why people need to make political points about that. Ten mins with our AC, even at the end of the path, when they deliver our shopping makes my week!

Kamiso, thanks for your very personal opinion of my daughter and her family. You know nothing of her situation at all. I was merely making a comment in my first post about how hard it is for parents and children stuck at home all day. Most others have agreed with me. Too much vitriol and nastiness on this website now!

If the daughter's mental health is so fragile surely she will fall apart completely if her family pass on the virus to her parents and they are seriously ill or even die?

Sounds as if her OH needs a kick up the b*m. They are his children too and his first responsibility is to his family. If this is his attitude he can barely know his own children, which is possibly why they are struggling so much and the problem is far more than just recent events.

@bluecat
Is it’s better to be old and lonely at home for months and then die, without your family.
This is a terrible time. Covid will not go away. It will become like flu, returning year on year and attacking the most vulnerable. There maybe a breakthrough on a vaccine, that’s not guaranteed. The number of deaths of 30,000 + are not all from confirmed Covid patients, some are not even tested. There are some good scientific facts available, not generally on the news channels, in the daily papers and definitely not Piers Morgan

Maddyone, your daughter and her husband are brave, as are all people who are asked to take risks to help the community. My daughter is on maternity leave at the moment but very soon she and her partner will be both be working again with homeless people, including addicts, ex-prisoners and people with severe mental health issues. These are people with limited opportunities to maintain hygiene and health, and often little motivation to do so. I am very anxious about the risk of them picking up the virus at work, and it must be even worse when your children are doctors.

As for the issue of the virus being like the flu, surely the point is that this virus is completely new. Seasonal flu is bad enough, that's true, but it has been around for a long time. Many people die but we do have effective anti-viral treatments for it. We also have vaccines for different strains. Scientists have some understanding of it. With COVID-19, it's a much steeper learning curve. For a start, it seemed to be a disease that attacked the lungs, till people started dying of heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure... It seems to be easier to transmit than flu and seems to have a higher mortality rate. The thing is, we are entirely defenceless against it. We are like the Native Americans, dying in their millions of diseases like measles and chickenpox, which they had never encountered before.

My other daughter, trying to explain the virus to her dad, said "Imagine that 2 animal viruses got together and had a baby virus that was a perfect machine for killing humans." She also said, before the lockdown, "The time to start panicking is when the scientists are frightened - and they're frightened now."

He was self isolating elsewhere. Doing what he considered best for his child as many others have done. Media just love all this, anything to pry into some else’s life.
If your scared or worried stay home. But don’t judge other people for the actions they take for their families.

Hi Sophiasnana, sounds like your daughter has got to the point that mine did, so her and her husband sat down and decided that they would take it in turns schooling the children. She can work from home so she does, Tuesday and Thursdays and stays upstairs working, and he works Monday, Wednesday and Friday upstairs. It has worked really well for them and the children are still keen to do schoolwork luckily. I think the change in tutor ie Dad instead of mum has worked. Maybe you daughter could try that.

There has always been a caveat that if needs help, physically or mentally then you can help. I have been 200 miles from home to help my son during a very difficult time. We did not mix with anyone else, and I would do it again if needed.
If you are socially distances and not risking anyone else’s health go support your family. You will all feel much happier

Tillybelle
What has happened in our care homes is absolutely horrible, but to reassure you a little, my daughter and son in law are GPs, and GPs have been going into care homes to give palliative care, in our area at least. I cannot speak for other areas. My son in law did one shift where he visited nine different care homes. That’s why I get fed up of hearing people moaning about not hugging their grandchildren. I’d just like my grandchildren to still have two parents at the end of this. I’m sure that other grandparents who have adult children who are medics or NHS workers will understand this.
So if you’re missing your grandchildren, or your families are stressed by the lockdown, try thinking about the families who are not locked down, because they’re medics.

@Nannan2 When I said Can’t wait to hug them, obviously I meant when we are allowed/free to be able to do so! WAIT being the operative word, We are sticking to the rules here!

Catteryslave1

Thanks for the link, there are some useful ideas there. (Sorry I don't know how to highlight your name.) I've forwarded this to my children for our grandchildren. All resources like this help and I'm sending recipe ideas, suggestions and links to resources weekly to try and support them all.

I am somewhat bemused by the very forceful way some people claim 'this is not the 'flu'. I could neither claim it is or it is not. Neither can many of the Scientists who simply refer to it as being a corona virus, which is a large group of viruses and includes the common cold. One of the biggest challenges of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the illness COVID-19, (CV19) is that it’s completely new. Seasonal flu, on the other hand, has been around for a long time, so scientists and doctors know a lot about it, and how to treat it and have preventative measures for it. We have our 'flu injection each year of a vaccine against the flu that has been estimated to be likely to occur that Winter.

As many have said, the 'flu is usually not as bad as CV19 which has proved to be very fast at spreading through the population and very quick to invade a person's body reaching the lungs and even the heart very quickly in some cases.

This is why we are taking it so seriously. Some people have died more quickly than we have been used to seeing e.g. with flu which might become pneumonia, and some people have displayed various symptoms not all others have e. g. diarrhoea. Another phenomenon is that other people seem to have had it and not felt ill. Yet presumably these people have spread it because they did not know they had it.

All this led us to take the drastic action we are doing now: lockdown. But this is hard to reverse. There will probably be some more cases popping up as we come out of this self-imposed isolation where, by its nature, our own immune systems have gone down somewhat. There are too other dreadful effects. Having emptied the hospitals as far as possible to be in readiness for a large influx of CV19 patients, those on waiting lists for other interventions have had to wait. There will be deaths from cancer, heart disease and other illnesses because people were not seen at the appropriate stage for treatment to save them. This has been reported by Consultants brave enough to speak out. They are brave because the NHS Staff have been told that if they discuss any aspect of their working conditions they will be given their notice.

There have been so many terrible things happen during the 12 weeks we have stayed in our homes. For me, I shall find it hard to get over seeing the news items where ambulances were turned away from hospitals because they were taking elderly patients with CV19 to be admitted. The Newscaster said hospitals are refusing admission to elderly people from Care Homes with CV19.

These poor people were returned to their Residential Home to be nursed in ordinary beds, with no special equipment, nothing to aid their breathing, nothing to make them comfortable. The poor Staff, most of whom had no appropriate training, had to care for them as they died, unable to breathe. The Staff had no PPE, or other equipment appropriate for such nursing conditions. Obviously, however well the Staff barrier nursed the sick patients, the disease spread and more and more elderly Residents became very ill and were refused admission to Hospital.

Then, around the second May Bank Holiday, I saw on TV Matt Hancock at the podium declaring that he had given Care Homes "all the support and help they needed right from the start". A Manager of such a Home was watching and said she was "angry" as "this was not true". They were on their own and were looking up how to deal with situations on Google, and they had no PPE. Their Residents died without the right medical support and no medical alleviation for their distressing symptoms. They died without seeing their family.

To all of you who think Covid 19 is just like a bad case of flu I can assure you it's not, our daughter in law had a mild dose quite near the start of the pandemic, to hear her trying to say a few words to us on the phone on the day she was taken to hospital was heart breaking my son is a key worker they assume that he bought the virus home, they have three children under ten and we live fifty miles away and are elderly, we would have loved to have been able to visit, look after our grandchildren, shop for them and give our son a hug, but we didn't, it was down to their kind neighbours and a local community help group who saw them through it. Thankfully she is now well and back to normal, but if she was asked if she felt she had suffered a bad dose of flu I know her answer would definitely be "no way". Please try to stick to this lockdown for a little while more.

Bluecat
The voice of reason, thank goodness at last.

Not sure I agree about DC but that’s a different matter anyway, and not relevant to this. The moaning gets on my nerves, my daughter and her husband have been working with Covid19 patients sometimes, not all the way through though. How much do you all think I’d like to hug my daughter and her children, or indeed my sons and their families. If DCs is getting slated for not even seeing his parents or sister, why do you all think it’s okay for you?
To be honest, I’m just relieved that my daughter and her husband are still alive to take care of our grandchildren. They’re doctors. Get a grip.

Jesus, I don't believe it.

Flu?? Hugs?? Where have you all been these past 3 months??

Thousands dead. Care homes decimated. Front line workers dead. People suffering the misery of being on ventilators, only to die a lonely and frightened death. Families broken hearted. People facing the future with God knows what problems from the damage this virus has done to their organs. Is none of this real any more?

All the sacrifices the country has made - personally, socially, financially. All of it done to get the virus under control and to protect everyone, particularly the vulnerable. Are we going to throw it all away?

We have all got children and grandchildren we long to be with, to hold in our arms. We know they are struggling to cope and our first instinct is to run to their side. It hurts, it really hurts, to be unable to help them. But how much worse would it be if we went to them, caught the virus and died? Or, worse still, if we brought it to them?

Oh, what the hell. The consensus is evidently weakening and we're going to see it break down. Let's all go round to our kids and give them a hug. If we do that, we might as well abandon social distancing and just mingle freely , shedding our viral load as we go. Get ready, hospitals, the second wave of grannies and grandads will be coming in soon to die. (Sorry about killing you in the process.)

I blame Dominic Cummings.

My daughter lives in Scotland and has been working from home since lockdown started. She lives alone and was coping well until the day things were relaxed in England yet were not relaxed in Scotland. We've had lots of Facetime conversations during this time as I too live alone and am working from home, but that day, as soon as I saw her I knew something was very wrong. She was visibly distressed and angry. Thankfully she was a lot better next day and I'm no longer worried about her, but I've not seen her so upset in a long time. I live 400 miles away so going round wasn't an option, but had I been nearer I'd have thought about it. It is so upsetting seeing our nearest and dearest struggling with the isolation and being unable to give any physical comfort.
The goings on with Dominic Cummings seem to be interpreted by some as giving us all permission to break the rules if we think it is neccessary, though I hope most of us won't go to the lengths he did, as we don't want the lockdown to need to be extended any more than it needs to be. We must try to hang in there, but if our loved ones are really struggling we must do what we can to help, as safely as possible. Trust your instincts, but follow the rules if you possibly can. Hmm ... now I'm sounding as confusing as Boris!

My daughter and grandson live with us, he’s only 20 months old. DD is front line NHS, so has been working all along. But grandsons nursery has been closed. He usually goes 2 days a week, and loves it. But now he’s a prisoner at home, and too young to understand. His behaviour has got worse and worse, it’s probably frustration. And I feel at the end of my tether. My daughter works 12 hour shifts, so it’s a really long day. My husband has dementia, and finds it hard to cope with the little ones tantrums.
So I’m piggy in the middle. Oh, roll on normality. ??

If everybody has been in quarantine for 14 days and you’re sure no one has it then going there and looking after the grandchildren or having them dropped off to let DD have a break is part of extenuating circumstances I should think!

Sophiasnana.
I really do sympathise with all mothers of young and school age children during this time. I heard of one recently who, due to his mother's seriously vulnerable health status, is unable to go out at all and they do not have a garden either. That, to me, is like being imprisoned, or under house-arrest.

I wonder if there is any kind of reward system your daughter could introduce to encourage the children to cooperate? Their rebellion is quite natural under the circumstances and I am sure your poor daughter is one of thousands of parents who are at their wits' end. It might help to call a truce and have a day off, then start again with the new incentive scheme in place.

I fully agree about the war. I was born just after it and nobody talked about it much. This is not like the war at all. I also hate this new phrase "the new normal". I find myself screaming inside when I hear it. I think it's one of the most manipulative phrases I have heard. That, plus the way we are addressed as though we are all 5 years old...

Apparently Dominic Cummings thiks if you caan justify it is ok

Yes it is so difficult. My daughter has had to work throughout the lockdown, as her company has been deemed as essential, although not key. Her husband is a key worker as he is a gas engineer and my 6 year old GS has been to school as a child of a key worker. The hours of school are 8 until 4.30. However, his proper school begins next Monday and the hours are 9 until 3. Before corona virus he went to the breakfast club before school every morning and then I met him from school at 3 every day. When the schools are back, they are not running the breakfast club and I can see that my daughter desperately needs my help with child care. I have kept to the rules all this time but now it seems that I am going to have to plunge back into childcare. My GS is on the autistic spectrum and we have a fantastic relationship and I can calm him down if he gets het up. My daughters company refuse to change her hours and they work on a shoestring of staff and my SIL had only just started a new job before lockdown and so can't be flexible at this stage. I am under 70 and in good health but it is still a worry.

Elaine1
Agree totally. This virus is nothing like seasonal flu. It behaves differently...flu and common cold are Corona viruses also. BUT. This is a completely new thing. If it reacted to warmth or cold it wouldn't prevail in difference countries where weather is different to ours.