An aggravation of my wound

For those of you that have been following me on Twitter for the last year, you will already know the story of Alice, my transgender daughter. Her 1023 days on the GIC (gender identity clinic) waitlist, a waitlist she would remain on now, if she were still alive, over five years since her referral.

I think we can agree, this is not a functioning waitlist. To me it is a holding cell, a torture chamber of dashed hopes and expectations. It is a place for lives left on hold and needs unmet. I remember being a teenager: the urgency, the energy, the impatience of wanting everything, not now, but yesterday. Surely some of those entrusted with building a healthcare service for our youth, remember their own teenage years in a similar way. But how can they? For if they did they would recognise that this entirely manufactured and preventable wait, that can now extend to decades, is unconscionable. How do they sleep at night, knowing this wait, as the coroner ruled at Alice's inquest, contributed to a preventable death? Alice was twenty when she died.

My mother, is ninety-seven. Even with my grief, and sore knee, and a childish inclination to be slothful whenever I return to my childhood home, I am too fast for her. Everything takes time, and time to do it is appreciated, more than that, necessary. A day cannot start too early, or be too full. It can wait, my mother says, often and freely. Except in matters of urgent healthcare of course. When, seven weeks ago, Mum fell and fractured a couple of ribs and a vertebra, the three hour wait for an ambulance felt long, too long. When she fell again last week, her newly healing ribs withstood the fall, but her arm, with skin prone to injury at the slightest knock, was badly cut and bruised. There is a history here, a story of another fall, a night in A and E, a story in my memoir that I won't tell now. Since then I have learnt a trick to keep Mum out of hospital with her spectacular but superficial wounds. Clingfilm. Wrapped round and round a gaping wound and bandaged tight in place, it stems the flow of blood and keeps the wound clean, without sticking, until we can seek an urgent visit with a nurse at her doctor's surgery in the morning. This is how we manage Mum's falls now, this is what we did last week.

But the fall is a worry to the nurse, who calls the doctor. There are reasons for the falls: a mis-step on the stairs, losing her grip on a stubborn weed, a dizzy feeling and a faint after too long head down, searching for something at the back of a bottom shelf. Yet a barrage of tests are requested. In the last seven days my mum has seen two doctors and two nurses over five visits. She has had a visit from the social care team at home and an occupational therapist is scheduled to call next week. I am grateful that my mother is being so well looked after. But... And I know the saying goes, that anything that comes before a 'but' is not to be believed, but...when you have had a child kill themselves...

• because when she first disclosed her gender dysphoria, the GP minimised and failed to act

• because once they were referred, they waited years and years, for an appointment that never came

• because the mental health nurses she had to rely on to 'hold' her whilst she waited, called her, he, and by another name

• because she was discharged from mental health services simply because of a date in the diary as she turned eighteen,

when you have a child kill themselves, because of all these things and more; the care my mother receives for her falls and her faints - the availability of it, the kindness of it, the abundance of it - aggravates the edges of the wound my daughter's death has left me nursing. And though I am grateful for the care my mother receives, after I have tended to her, and sat a while, with tea and cake and reminisced about her life, before any of my children were born, after I have done all this, I drive back home and cry. I cry tears, and I cry out loud. Where was this for Alice, I cry, where was this for her?