Relative of Scarborough care home resident reflects on two years since first lockdown
On this day in 2020, Boris Johnson said people must stay at home and should only leave for essential reasons
The relative of a Scarborough care home resident has been reflecting on the last two years of the Coronavirus pandemic.
On this day in 2020, Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown saying people must stay at home and should only leave for essential reasons.
74-year-old Alan Ashton's wife Susan, who is 75, has dementia and is at Saint Cecilia's in Scarborough.
During the lockdowns, he and their family had to severely limit visiting due to the restrictions but now, to this present day, they are able to regularly visit her now. They still have to do a test beforehand as well as wear PPE when they are there.
Alan describes what it was like two years ago: "I was used to going six days a week to help her with her lunches. It was a very difficult few months having video calls with my wife because she's non verbal. She speaks very little now having a one-way conversation."
He added: "I am actually doing three days a week now of going in to help her with lunch and one day a week I go just on a normal visit in which my son or granddaughter comes with me. I'm not getting any younger. I still try my best.
"The main reason I used to go in to help her eat was because she ate better with me than she did with the carers. It's not necessarily so now because of me not going for so long and her seeing the carers every day, the carers become family so to speak.
"She knows who I am but I'm not sure that she knows me as her husband or whether she just thinks I'm another carer that's helping her with her lunch. Because she doesn't speak you don't get any feedback about that but she does recognise me."
Alan said: "I didn't think that we'd still have lockdown at this stage. I thought that by now we would have learnt to cope with it to live with it. It's only a few weeks in and there were some lockdowns are the care home again because staff testing positive, although residents were OK.
"It's time now to start with nursing homes in particular to start doing away with some of the restrictions of wearing PPE etc for visits, because everybody that's going is being tested and everybody's been vaccinated."