Dr Lucy Pollock
- Dr Lucy Pollock Pippa Kelly 57:10
Older people, says geriatrician Dr Lucy Pollock, are interesting. They are also boring, good-humoured, bad-tempered, serene, irritable, amusing, grouchy, selfish, generous, happy-go-lucky and nervy. “Older people are just all of us grown up”. Of course they are – so why can’t we all see that?
It is in order to open up the conversation around old age, something we all reach if we are lucky enough and yet seem to shy away from, that Somerset-based Lucy has written her book, called – without ducking or diving – The Book About Getting Older, for people who don’t want to talk about it.
Published last year, it’s received plaudits from reviewers as diverse as the British Geriatrics Society and comedian Sandi Toksvig, who described it as the most important book about the second half of your life you’ll ever read, to the ex-shadow chancellor Ed Balls. The Evening Standard summed it up for me. “Dr Lucy Pollock,” it said, “is a geriatrician, and the kind of person you want to clone”.
Lucy, who has specialised in the care of those who are frail and elderly for 21 years, says that in the last quarter of a century geriatric medicine has come into its own as more and more doctors realise how important and interesting it is, and it now attracts young medics in their droves. She loves it because it’s complicated, team-based, unbelievably rewarding and involves a lot of cake. “You have to be really nosy to be a good geriatrician” she says.
Towards the end of this pretty lengthy book – which reads like a dream – and after she’s covered all the knotty issues, from the extravagant cocktail of pills often prescribed for older people to preventing falls, choosing care homes and gently suggesting to an ageing relative that they should give up driving, she looks back over her years as a geriatrician.
She observes that her patients have been assets with gifts to offer of which she’s been the recipient. She’s been given a look, a letter, a pat on the hand, cherry liqueurs, an email that left her sitting at her desk, tears Streaming, a card, a smile, a folded note that contains love as tangible as a pressed flower, secrets… and lesson after lesson in courage.
You can see now what I mean about her joyous writing. She brings subjects alive with characters who walk off her pages into your life – characters like George and Margaret, Nancy and Clem, Noel and Mark – and all their individual, sometimes uplifting, sometimes heart-breaking, stories teach us things about old age, whether it’s advance care plans, incontinence, near-impossible discussions around resuscitation or the big D, dementia, which she describes as “a word primed with emotion, pinned in the thoughts of many to images of loss, fear, indignity” before going on to explain why this perception is so wrong.
Lucy Pollock, proud patron of Age UK Somerset, is obviously, very clever, but she’s very funny too, and human and self-aware. She offers her chapters on dementia with, and I quote, “some hesitation and considerable respect” because she hasn’t experienced a diagnosis of dementia or known what it’s like to live in the same house as someone with the condition day in, day out. How wonderfully refreshing is that.
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