This was really upsetting, it was a really, really exhausting time as well because I was just watching my father fade from, month by month really, so that eventually I couldn’t really have a reasonable conversation with him. And I was his sole carer, the only one in the family really who my dad could really rely on. And he has a sister, -well he’s got a couple of sisters who live in the States and his sister in Miami was always really supportive and my dad, when she’d phone, my dad was always really strong and she would say, ‘Oh he’s fine. There isn’t anything wrong with him. There was this sort of connection that they had that my dad seemed to be empowered by, by hearing her voice. But obviously that, my dad used to be upset on the phone [coughs] because they hadn’t seen each other for like 59 years.

Gosh, that’s a long time.

Yeah. So she’d known, she was 20 and my dad was 19, I think, when they last saw each other.

So basically they were going to let my dad die. They could have covered up all of their neglect. So, -but they weren’t feeding him and I know, I think they were just throwing the food away, because the way things were emptied, like the soup thing and the plate, it didn’t look like, because, you know. And also, because I’ve worked in a hospital I know what happens. So I went away for a while thinking I’ve got to go out for an hour, and I came back at about 5 oclock and I looked at my, -because I was always looking at my dad’s charts and I’m going, his blood pressure is going right down. It was like 75 over something. I’m thinking it should be at least 120, and my dad’s all like, and he’s lying flat. They were going to just let him die. So I got, -I woke my dad up again and I got him a drink and I said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute. I went out and there was this junior doctor on the ward and I said, ‘I trained as a nurse. Can you tell me what my dad’s haemoglobin is please?’ And he said, 7. So I said, ‘so when is my dad getting a blood transfusion?’ So of course they had to do it. He obviously checked with his boss, and then I stayed there until, -whilst he’d put the blood up and I said, ‘Dad’, because my dad had kept pulling out the drips. But they weren’t, -he was just so unhappy. He was like, it was just like I kept saying, well my dad shouldn’t have been back round here. He should never have been moved from this hospital.

So I got my dad’s stick, we left the ward, walked along the corridor and I said, ‘Dad, I’m taking you home. I mean, I felt like I don’t know, like a sort of fugitive. It’s just like, like a fugitive. Like, it’s a whole, some real deep rooted ethnic feeling came up, because obviously my ancestors were slaves, as I said earlier. The idea of someone being kept, someone I cared about being put somewhere where I knew it would be detrimental to them was like unacceptable.

But there’s this feeling of losing freedom really came up because one of my, an old family friend came to visit my dad once, a couple of times, on the psychiatric unit and I said to him about this whole thing about freedom and he said, ‘oh you don’t need, you don’t need to tell me and we can’t really put it into words but we feel it in here. Because I felt like, well it wasn’t a feeling of a threat, it was a threat. It was a threat to my father’s wellbeing. He was, his freedom was taken away and my, -I felt like my, my freedom was temporarily because I just got boxed in with this whole thing about, you know when I said about wanting to get my dad out the window. I mean, that’s desperation thinking, isn’t it, to get away? And so there’s this, it’s like ‘oh these white people are holding us’ so I hadn’t, I’d never really had it in such an intense, deep sort of way before about a feeling of yes, I’m different. Yes, my father is different, our background’s different. And I’ve read about it, I’ve read where people from certain ethnic minorities who have been persecuted, you know like Jewish people, Gypsies, when they experience a trauma they can experience it on a much sort of deeper level than people who haven’t been persecuted over in their background. But to me it was like, well my father, -mental health, my father didn’t have mental capacity so therefore he had less rights and he couldn’t speak up for himself so his daughter is trying to, attempting to, and I’m alienating myself minute by minute from the professionals and they weren’t actually providing, they weren’t providing anybody for me.

Someone to help mediate with the doctors and the nurses. Someone to have stepped in to support me to get the medics to acknowledge that my father wasn’t fit enough to be moved from the general hospital, to stand up to the Section Order. Because I didn’t, -later on my solicitor said, ‘Oh why didn’t I discharge my father from the section order?’ I said, ‘because I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do. So yeah, I needed someone, I think people in this sort of situation, they need somebody independent of the NHS, and the PALS workers are still employed by the NHS and I think they only seem to want to go so far anyway. That was my experience. And the more, you know, I was just really upset. I mean, I can see why I wasn’t, why I was, why was I falling out with people but I kept saying to them, ‘but this is a hospital. Aren’t you used to people having, being in traumatic states like this?’ And this is my dad who can’t speak up for himself. So it wasn’t just about my dad’s physical situation, was it?

And I went and sat in this little reception area in the corridor because all these nurses and managers all started running and so I felt like oh my God, like, Jorun, I was just traumatised from being attacked, traumatised at seeing my father like this. So then this junior doctor got me some water and he said, ‘it’s all right, it’s just all too much pressure isn’t it?’ And he was sort of understanding. Then this consultant, who wasn’t my dad’s consultant came out and he said, ‘come and sit in my office a minute and have a couple, I’ll just talk two minutes. So we sat in there and he said, ‘oh my dad’s got cancer everywhere and he’s got it in his lungs. And I said, ‘well I wasn’t told it was in his lungs’, and he said, ‘well it’s everywhere. And then he starts saying to me, ‘oh, how many brothers have you got?’ And I was going, -what’s this got to do with anything? ‘Three. ‘What do they do?’ ‘Nothing’, I said. ‘They don’t help my dad at all. He said, ‘oh, no, I mean what’s their profession. So I told him, and then I figured, he thinks that I need psychiatric care. He thinks that I’m sectionable or something or that I’ve got some problems, and I said, ‘look I know what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m traumatised by the NHS, by what my father’s been through. He’s been on a section, now he’s back here. I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more. I said, ‘I’m disgusted with this place’, and walked out. But you see, you could see one by one, hour after hour I’m just, in their eyes I’m becoming the problem and meanwhile there’s this elderly man full of cancer with dementia, ‘we might as well let him die because he’s got cancer everywhere. ‘He doesn’t want his drip in, blah, blah’, you know? ‘She’s written to the MP, there’s too much attention on this.

So I went down, said the same thing to the staff nurse, he said the same thing. I came back, gave my dad some more water, went down the third time and I said, ‘My dad needs a doctor and if you do not call one I’m going to go and get one from the general hospital and I’m bringing one back because my father is really ill. So eventually he called out the doctor. She came in and they started, they thought because of my dad’s heart problems they thought he was having a heart attack. Did an ECG, everything looked normal but she’s asking me about my dad’s medical history and I said, ‘but it’s all in the notes. I am exhausted, I’ve had two weeks of hell here and my father has been neglected. Why are you asking me everything?’ And she says, ‘oh the notes’, she said, ‘the notes aren’t here. So she said that my dad was dehydrated, that he really needed an intravenous infusion. Because he was on a psychiatric unit he couldn’t have one because of health and safety, and so I said, ‘well he needs to be moved to a general hospital today then’, but she wasn’t prepared to call up a consultant who can release somebody, obviously, from a Section. So she said, I said, ‘they’re not looking after my father. She said, ‘well we can get more fluids into him. I said, ‘but they’re incompetent here. This is why he’s in this state that he’s in now.

So basically they were going to let my dad die. They could have covered up all of their neglect. So, -but they weren’t feeding him and I know, I think they were just throwing the food away, because the way things were emptied, like the soup thing and the plate, it didn’t look like, because, you know. And also, because I’ve worked in a hospital I know what happens. So I went away for a while thinking I’ve got to go out for an hour, and I came back at about 5 oclock and I looked at my, -because I was always looking at my dad’s charts and I’m going, his blood pressure is going right down. It was like 75 over something. I’m thinking it should be at least 120, and my dad’s all like, and he’s lying flat. They were going to just let him die. So I got, -I woke my dad up again and I got him a drink and I said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute. I went out and there was this junior doctor on the ward and I said, ‘I trained as a nurse. Can you tell me what my dad’s haemoglobin is please?’ And he said, 7. So I said, ‘so when is my dad getting a blood transfusion?’ So of course they had to do it. He obviously checked with his boss, and then I stayed there until, -whilst he’d put the blood up and I said, ‘Dad’, because my dad had kept pulling out the drips. But they weren’t, -he was just so unhappy. He was like, it was just like I kept saying, well my dad shouldn’t have been back round here. He should never have been moved from this hospital.

Earlier in the, at afternoon visit I went to leave the ward and I said to one of the nurses, like asked her where the public toilet was so she told me and as I was turning to leave I had this pashmina round my neck. I caught the eye of this woman who I’d seen being violent before coming up to me and I’m thinking, ‘right I’m going, I’m getting away from her. And she caught me by my scarf and was just like, I was being like half strangled. It took three really big nurses to get her off me. So just like more, it was just like, I was going like this more layer and layer of trauma and stress and bad treatment, and it was just like as though it’s a nightmare, I kept thinking, ‘oh I’m going to wake up, and this is like, this isn’t a nightmare’, this is going on. So as I went back because my dad was, I’d told my dad I was going back and I went back in three hours later. That’s right, I went to see my auntie, went back thinking if somebody else comes up to me I’m just going to wallop them because I’ve just had enough. So then there’s this, yeah, this bang and the crash and the nurses are running around. Then they realise the problem’s in the side room opposite my dad. Oh, they’ve moved my dad to a side room closer to the nurse station by now and they’d given him like a bed table because we’d asked for things, but only because we’d requested it. And then the nurses were, couldn’t get into this room opposite and it was in darkness. It was the same three big nurses pushed their way into this room. It was a man, it was a male patient in there on his own I had noticed the day before. They put the light on and I could see these naked legs and I’m going ‘oh’, I’m like ‘now what?’ And it was the woman who had attacked me earlier and she was naked, and I’d seen her naked before from the waist down in a male dormitory on the ward, on the floor. And I’m going, like ‘what?’, you know. So she’s been in there, she could have assaulted that man. How do I know she’s not in here interfering with my father when I’m not here, whos vulnerable?

It was one of the worst days of my life, Jorun. And I just felt like everything I had campaigned for and kept my dad safe and independent and free, and my dad was looking ill, you know. I’d seen him earlier in the morning, at 9 oclock in the morning I went in and he was doubled up in pain, and he was clearly not ready to be moved anywhere. And obviously he had bone cancer everywhere so any move was just making him feel worse. So eventually they called me in and I saw, I was just at boiling, at like blowing up point. I could have just really punched somebody because this is four years. Four years of my father having had dementia, four years of standing up for him knowing that I had been the person that had kept him free. And then at a time when he was so ill they sectioned him. So I went in, and the psychiatrist said, ‘we’ve sectioned your father. And I said, ‘but he’s not well enough to be moved from here’, and he said, ‘oh well the consultant says he’s medically fit to be moved from the ward. And then I looked at the GP and I’m going, ‘what are you doing here?’ Because I’ve, he had been part of the problem. So then the psychiatrist immediately starts defending the GP and is like, ‘oh don’t speak to him like that. Then the social worker says, ‘we couldn’t get the GP that your father now sees in the practice, and also Dr, this doctor has been seeing your father for a couple of years and knows him well. I was just so angry. At that moment, and ever since all communication with the social, my dad’s psychiatrist had been nonexistent.