Just back from a remarkable memorial celebration of the life of Dr Ann McPherson, Oxford GP, who died recently of pancreatic cancer, aged 65. She is probably best known to the public as the author of Diary of a Teenage Health Freak, which sold over a million copies and led to the setting up of a website for teenage health queries. She wrote many other health books for the general public and also Fresher Pressure, a guide for new students. She was far more than “just” a local and much admired GP. She was a campaigner and a pioneer in the use of the new technology to help patients find out more about their illnesses and share their experiences with others in the same condition, namely, www.healthtalkonline.org. The site covers about 40 conditions, including the cancers that overcame Ann. Hugh Grant’s mother had also suffered from pancreatic cancer, and he joined her as a supporter of the website, and stood in for her when she was awarded the BMJ Lifetime Achievement Award for Medical Communication a few days before her death. She also took up the campaign for assisted dying, after her own diagnosis, and founded the pressure group Health Professionals for Assisted Dying.
This topic (on which I have not made up my mind) has been vigorously debated in the Lords. In 2004 Lord Joffe introduced the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, which did not succeed. On the other side of the issue in the Lords is Baroness Ilora Finlay, Professor of Palliative Medicine, who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Dying Well, which campaigns against assisted dying and promotes more palliative medicine to ensure a peaceful end. This issue will no doubt return to the Lords and is now more extensively covered than ever in the media, not least because of Ann’s taking up the issue.
But at the memorial event today at Balliol College, attended by about 1000 people by my calculation, the talk was very much of Ann as a mother and grandmother, brimming with love for her children and grandchildren, spending a life balancing the demands of a busy GP and medical professional with motherhood. A good mother does not have to stop work in order to raise a great family. Ann was the sort of GP whom one would have trusted with the proposed – or any – rearrangement of the NHS. How wonderful that the brightest medical student of her year should choose to be a GP rather than going on to become a specialist. She fought for her patients’ needs, a woman in what was largely a man’s world at the time when she started her career.
I get very irritated when I hear about these ‘do it all so remarkably’ women.
How many mignon’s did this paragon have to do what she wasn’t able to do herself, either at home or at work? Something has to give, as it is not possible to be all things to all expectations.
Women are not super hero’s. They cannot do everything that is needed to simultaneously be a responsible parent and full time career follower. And they should not be forced into believing they can. The disastrous effect this futile and ridiculous attitude, coming from ignorant government dwellers, is erroneous and a big rethink is needed post haste.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/05/work-motherhood-torn-true-stories.html
An exhausting example of what is expected of women and the sacrifice all have to make, and most of all the dreadful effect on children, is found in this so called comic film, ‘One Fine Day.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9SZO5lkYGk
You will see that both parents have one overriding worry, losing their jobs. Not the effect their lifestyle is having on the two of them and the most important outcome of their lives, their children. They are fixated on the people who are exploiting them and who will cut them loose as soon as they find an inexhaustible replacement.
If a woman marries a man or lives with a man who doesn’t want to support her whilst she raises their children, then she only has herself to blame for settling for so little.
Men who don’t want to support women,whilst they are raising their children, must supply the additional resources to employ those who will be ‘a less than adequate’ stand in for her, in order to fill those hours she cannot be committed to her ‘full time role’ of being a mother and wife.
Children are not the responsibility of the state. Their genuine need for parenting is not the responsibility of the state either. The state cannot adequately supply the substitute role of parent or parenting. The outcome of so called ‘being in care’ proves that. As does reports showing just what being at a nursery entails. It is a total disgrace. And worst of all, you know it but won’t accept it, regardless of the horrendous results of not doing so.
And every day I thank the fates for the extreme good fortune of having a mother and father who understood the meaning of, and the responsibilities of, being full time parents.
Completely inaccurate as far as Dr McPherson was concerned, a loving and successful doctor and mother, and inaccurate for the millions of women who use their education, raise their children without frustration, and avoid putting the clock back for women’s life chances.
Not enough ‘ordinary, women in government is the reason for the inadequate understanding and the obvious dearth of knowledge with so called ‘women’ in Parliament now.
It may be good if you were to think of pushing the clock forward rather than back and take the idea of silver spoons and mouths out of your thinking process.
Women are tired of the conversion from feminine to masculine they have to submit to. They want to be acknowledged for the natural gifts they have and as the people they really are, rather than a daily confusion and total lack of self esteem whilst trying, desperately, to satisfy the bent thinking power of the politically indoctrinated, so called, feminists, who truly, as seen from the above post, despise women and what womanhood means. You demean everything women stand for.
Have a referendum on it if you really believe what you are pushing. Or, is that too much to allow women the right of real choice through the ballot box.
http://www.healthtalkonline.org/
What you might sicknesstalk online.
If you go to a GP twice with the same complaint and the ‘certain knowledge’ of what you have got, they ave no hesitation in sending you to a Surgeon consultant.
They in turn are more than happy to bring out the knives.
The idea of presenting the patient with the “cost” of the treatment before they decide whether to agree to it, would put few off.
In fact knowing the cost might well impress them enough to imagine that whatever it is has to be done.
GPs usually exempt themselves from thoughts of personal illness, although a GP I recently visited, not mine, was brought up in a Leper colony in Southern India, where both her parents resided. She became a Christian and a GP, practising in UK.
@Twm:
I’m not sure all GP’s are simply go betweens for surgeons with knives who can’t wait to chop.
At this very moment in time, a lifelong friend of mine, who has never been sick for one day in life, even with a cold, went to the GP with a minor ailment. This GP decided to take some blood for a check up, as he simply ‘felt’ something wasn’t quite right.
The tests came back with signs something wasn’t as it should be and an early appointment was made at hospital. My friend went along quite happily without an inkling of something wrong and so more tests were taken. It was a big shock when the answer came back as ‘cancer somewhere.’
A couple of weeks later the shock had grown into disbelief. This person, who still showed no sign of being ill, not tired, eating well, filled with life, had/has, fast moving aggressive cancer of the lung, which in four weeks has gone from nothing but a shadow on an x ray to a tumour the size of a tennis ball. Three to six months they said, and offered treatment. But, explained, with treatment it would only give a couple of months extra, six at most.
This dear friend decided the time left was too precious to spend with the fall out from chemo and all that entailed. It would remove them from the love and company surrounding them, as, still eating and sleeping and feeling okay was within their grasp.
The GP supports this patients decision, as do friends and family who love them dearly. Although we all so wish something, just something, would save this person. The surgeons likewise, have been solidly with them. Even though they felt they should be more useful.
My point being, the doctors, in this case, have not resorted to the knife, or, insisted on taking the choices away from my friend. They have respected the need to end it as they would wish to do. Which, after all, has to be the very essence of being a true medic.
This url shows how the majority of women feel each day. And the Germaine Greer’s, who have childhood problems themselves, are entirely out of it.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y8UBAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=Women+don%27t+want+to+work+and+raise+kids&source=bl&ots=JE6PGz_Q7x&sig=H3wnlEBmSfxfGHrooLfX8rph9Ls&hl=en&ei=w3L4TarfHumAhAfT_eWmDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&sqi=2&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=Women%20don%27t%20want%20to%20work%20and%20raise%20kids&f=false
And to go one step further, I had a very dear friend, who was the wonderful super hero women akin to this Dr Ann, with the excellent education, the glorious job, the high achieving husband, and the wardrobes full of beautiful clothes for her perfect children to wear and appear so well off and so extremely happy.
My friend woman wept daily as she flew to the next meeting in the next city, she wanted nothing more than to stay home with her pretty curly haired children, who couldn’t sleep at night because they wanted to be awake for mummy to come home. Which meant, when she got home, she couldn’t sleep either because her kids needed her time, attention and affection.
They had all the trimmings, the cars, the mortgages, the nannies and the cleaners, the full monty you push on us that women dream of. She couldn’t stop work as they were so financially committed, but, she realised too late, it was all a con and she was swept up in the political illusion that women were not fulfilled as just that, they only meant ‘something’ when they became men and so called bread winners. It ended for her in a lonely backwoods when she committed suicide simply because she was unable to handle not being the mother and wife she always longed to be. She cut her life short with a hose attached to her car exhaust, leaving a note that said her beloved children would be better off without such a bad example of ineffectual motherhood in their lives. She had, she wrote, no more to give.
BD: Clearly an icon in your life; we all feel your loss. Perhaps empathy was her most endearing quality. Not everybody can handle knowledge of illness it can cause problems upstairs. Are doctors surgeries not filled with the ‘the worried well’?
@The Hansard People:
Thank you for this one. But, it is alone, there were a few?
Hansard people:
So very many thanks.