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IN TOUCH – Coronavirus and blind isolation

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TX:Ìý 31.03.20Ìý 2040-2100

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PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý KEVIN CORE

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White

Good evening.Ìý Tonight, plenty of examples of the resourcefulness In Touch listeners are showing in the face of social isolation.Ìý Plus, some answers to the kinds of problems it’s posing.Ìý For instance, those who feel they have to choose between sight-saving treatment and protecting themselves from coronavirus.

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Clip

Hospitals are trying to make sure that they give injections for macular degeneration and similar conditions because people will lose their vision if they don’t have the injection or there’s a very good chance of that.

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White

More information on that later in the programme.

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And, talking of resourcefulness, here’s another of those blind achievers which history seems to have forgotten.

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Music

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Clip

He’s ringing a bell that probably weighs 10 or 12 hundredweight, he’s ringing it for nearly four hours continuously and if you go wrong you don’t have the visual clues to help you to get right again.

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White

But first, the voices of blind and partially sighted people coping as best they can with the challenges of self-isolation.Ìý And some examples of imaginative solutions being offered.Ìý Here’s Anna Rigby from Chester.

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Rigby

We actually received a little note through our door.Ìý They’re a group of people who have got together to set up a bit of a help scheme for our street.Ìý We scanned the note with one of our iPhone apps, texted her and then two days later we got the same note through our letterbox in Braille.Ìý We were quite impressed.Ìý They’ve given us all like a help card that we can put in our window if we need any help.Ìý And I think that’s really – really good because it sort of – it makes you feel not quite so alone.

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White

Graham Page from Stepney also feels he’s adjusting to this new remote existence.

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Page

I feel a little bit isolated because it’s always good to actually meet other people but I am talking to people on – on the phone, on Facetime or using Skype and you think at the beginning how am I going to cope with two months of this, quite conceivably.

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White

And how to combine safe social distancing with doing your shopping, is what’s been occupying the thoughts of Holly Scott Gardener.

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Gardener

I would honestly choose not to be guided.Ìý I have my cane and I think I can get the person who is assisting me shopping to walk at one end of the trolley and I can walk at the other but also I could have my cane out instead of holding on to the trolley and I can just tell them – hey, can you tell me if we’re going to take a left or a right.Ìý Whilst, if you’re holding on to one end of the trolley and they the other it’s not the two metres, you’re still keeping some distance.Ìý Maybe you go to the supermarket wearing gloves, and I would advise that, wear some disposable gloves because you’re going to be holding on to that shopping trolley and you’re going to want to touch boxes of things – oh does this feel like the thing I want to buy.

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White

Meanwhile Jane Vernon in London has a concern about access to other services during the crisis.

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Vernon

I’m a fairly solitary person.Ìý I don’t think, being somebody with long term mental health problems, that it’s going to make that much difference.Ìý I think, for me, it’s the idea if I did have a crisis what help would be available, rather than that I’m finding being on my own particularly depressing, at the moment, I mean we’re not long into this.

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White

Now if Ellie Clark thought isolation would mean getting out of schoolwork, her mum, Katie, had other ideas.

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Actuality – Ellie and Katie Clark

Katie

What do we do in the morning?Ìý What’s the first thing…?

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Ellie

So, we do maths and then we do English and then we do, in the afternoon, the fun stuff like art and topic and PE.

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Katie

Well, for me, the essential skills for Ellie is reading really, reading the Braille, because that’s her weakness.Ìý So, for us, it’s just making sure that she gets enough time each day to practise reading which is really difficult for children that obviously have limited sight because their opportunities to read incidentally are very minimal, you know they can’t read cereal packets or…

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Ellie

Or writing on the laptop.

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Katie

Yeah, or anything, incidentally, that my five-year-old is picking up on without having to sit down with me to do.Ìý So, for me, it’s just – it’s making sure that we make time for that, although it’s not Ellie’s favourite activity.Ìý No but we fit it in.

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Ellie

Well it gets a bit – it gets jostled around whether it’s my favourite or not, depending on the night and the time of day we read and what book it is and it depends on everything really.

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White

And Holly Chuke [phon.] perhaps sums up how many of you are making the best of things.Ìý Her message – let’s apply the lessons from this to make things better for blind people when it’s all over.

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Chuke

I think it definitely shows that things can be done in order to make working more accessible, so that could be doing virtual meetings from home or it could be doing something similar, like me offering training from home.Ìý And I think it’s important that we remember how things were done this time, right now, in order for us to move forward in the future and if something does arise or come up where a person might not be able to get into work one day for some reason or their visual impairment is presenting an inaccessibility problem, then we can say well during the coronavirus outbreak we offered this and this worked well so why can’t we offer it again and put those adaptions in place for someone.

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White

Well it would be good to hear more examples of how people are coping for future programmes.

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One worry many people have had is that they might have to make a choice between sight saving treatment and life saving isolation.Ìý Or that their appointments might simply be cancelled.Ìý

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Sue Curtis was one of those.Ìý She has macular disease and needs the drug Eylea to control her loss of sight.

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Curtis

I rang the hospital to make sure the appointment was still going ahead and they said yes.Ìý I rang the information at my GP’s surgery and said what precautions do I have to take.Ìý Wear your glasses.Ìý And I wore my over sunglasses.Ìý And put a scarf round your nose and your mouth.Ìý Do not touch your face at all, was the biggest one.Ìý I thought my sight is most important.Ìý The staff in Lincoln Hospital are absolutely brilliant, I cannot fault anyone of them.Ìý We were all sat apart.Ìý It was the travel there and the travel back that I was a bit concerned about.Ìý But it’s worth going because your sight is so important.Ìý I got home, washed my hands twice, washed my glasses because you tend to touch them.Ìý Made myself a cup of tea, sat down and I thought – you did it.

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White

So, good on you, Sue.Ìý But as the Chief Executive of the Macular Society, Cathy Yelf, explained, this has been a major source of worry to many of their members.

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Yelf

Well these are very, very difficult times for mainly elderly patients who are frightened that if they don’t go to hospital they will miss their injection and their sight is at risk but if they do then of course they put themselves at risk from catching the coronavirus.Ìý So, this is a very, very frightening time for people.Ìý What we’re trying to say to patients is that hospitals are doing their very best to make sure that they’re putting everything in place to protect people from the virus when they go.Ìý And so, overall, we think it’s wise for most people to try to get to the hospital to have their injection.

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White

And how able are the hospitals to cope because obviously we’re hearing they can only do things that are absolutely necessary now because of coronavirus, so what’s the situation with the clinics and the hospitals?

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Yelf

Well, at the moment, and this may change, but at the moment the hospitals are trying to make sure that they give injections for macular degeneration and similar conditions because these are sight threatening conditions and people will lose their vision if they don’t have the injection or there’s a very good chance of that.Ìý Overall, at the moment, the eye clinics for eye injections tend to be quieter than usual because all the routine work has been postponed for now and so the clinics are quiet.Ìý The hospitals are trying to make sure that the appointments are spaced out, so that people don’t all arrive at once and where possible, they’re finding actually additional waiting areas to put particularly vulnerable people, so they’re not having to sit next to everybody else.Ìý Lots of people are saying, well actually, the experience in the eye clinic at the moment is actually better than it usually is because it’s much quieter.Ìý But it is – one of the big challenges, of course, for patients, is getting to the hospital under these circumstances as well as the fear of what they may find when they get there.

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White

And do you have any advice that you can offer about that?Ìý We keep hearing about these armies of volunteers but I’m also hearing that people aren’t quite sure how to contact those volunteers.

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Yelf

Well I think that’s true; it’s going to take a little while to get that massive system up and running but there are existing systems in place in some areas. ÌýSo, it’s a question of people really trying to find out whether there is anybody who can take them, with lots more people working at home there may be somebody who’s locally willing to take them to the hospital.Ìý But some people are really struggling now to get to hospital through public transport systems of course and that’s perfectly understandable.

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White

So, the message really is if you’ve got an appointment then assume that everything is still okay and if you can get there you should definitely keep that appointment?

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Yelf

You should unless you are ill yourself.Ìý If you’re ill or if you have any, obviously, any symptoms of coronavirus yourself then of course you are asked not to go to the hospital.Ìý And if the hospital phones you and says don’t come, then obviously that’s going to be necessary as well.Ìý But I think a lot of hospitals are also trying to set up other ways of speaking to patients, so, perhaps having teleconference calls rather than a face-to-face appointment.Ìý The other thing that patients may find is that if they’re on the drug Lucentis, which usually is given every month to six weeks, they may be switched to another drug called Eylea which lasts slightly longer in the eye, perhaps eight weeks, and more people may find themselves being switched from drug to the other, so that the overall number of injections has to go down.Ìý And it’s also likely that if they are used to having a monitoring appointment in between their injections that those appointments might be stopped and people will be given an injection automatically.Ìý So, the routine may change over time.

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White

What else are you able to offer people?Ìý Because obviously you also have to protect your staff and your members.

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Yelf

We do.Ìý So, sadly, at the moment, we’ve had to postpone all our face-to-face services and the main thing that that involves, of course, is our peer support group, so these are 400 plus groups around the country who on a regular basis hold meetings and support people with all forms of macular degeneration, now they can’t happen at the moment.Ìý But what we’ve done is, with our regional managers, put in place a sort of virtual network of support groups, so that people are meeting electronically or by telephone and so on.Ìý And that seems to be becoming increasingly popular and people are beginning to get the hang of meeting and sharing their hints and tips and the fellowship that the groups engender is now happening in a different format.Ìý We also have a lot of telephone based services anyway, so, our counselling service, our advice and information service, our befriending service – all of these are telephone based services anyway, so, they are happening as normal and in fact expanding and new volunteers are coming forward to help us run some of those services.

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White

Cathy Yelf of the Macular Society.

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Well, there’s much more to say on the current situation, of course, and we hope you’ll be sharing your experiences with us as the weeks go by.Ìý But we’ll also be looking for some light relief too.Ìý So, here’s an example:

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We recently told you about a new musical featuring the life of Nicholas Sanderson.Ìý He was a blind boy from Barnsley in the 18th century who was a mathematical genius, a kind of Stephen Hawking of his day.Ìý Well the musical has naturally had to be postponed but for one listener it brought to mind another blind unsung hero of history.

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Music

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Davies

My name’s Gareth Davies, I’m currently completing a PhD at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and I’ve been researching bell ringing in the 17th and 18th centuries in Cambridge.Ìý In particular, I’ve been looking at the extent to which the ringers ran it as a business and sometimes made significant amounts of money from their activities.

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Music

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I just happened to be listening to In Touch last week when the item about Nicholas Sanderson, the Cambridge mathematician, came up and my ears pricked up immediately because he was one of the 18th century characters that I’d briefly been writing about in my research.Ìý He wasn’t a bell ringer himself, as far as I know, but he was interested in the theory of bell ringing.Ìý And in one of his publications he posed some questions for students, he was interested in them working out how many different combinations of 12 bells could be rung in total and how long it might take for those to be rung if they were rung continuously.Ìý To which he correctly identified the answer as being somewhat over 479 million and about 45 years.

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Music

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I had no idea, until I heard the programme, that Sanderson was actually blind but it made an immediate connection for me to one of the Cambridge ringers at the time, John Ingersoll [phon.], who rang at the Church of Great St Mary’s, where the leading church bell ringers of the time met, was entirely blind himself and he rang in a number of very difficult bell ringing performances.

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Music

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We don’t know a huge amount about Ingersoll’s background.Ìý It would seem he was probably born in about 1710 and we don’t know where Ingersoll learnt to ring.Ìý It wasn’t usual for them to teach people at Great St Mary’s, so he must have already been a ringer before he joined the society there.Ìý But clearly when he did join, he was already extremely skilled in it.

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Music

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So, there are three things that most people who take up bell ringing need.Ìý One is a certain amount of physical coordinator, the second is good listening skills and the third one is usually the ability to pick up visual clues from the other ringers.Ìý Now if you have any of those faculties missing it makes being a ringer much more difficult.Ìý But what’s extraordinary about Ingersoll is not just that he managed to become a bell ringer but the things he were ringing were at the very forefront of difficulty in change ringing at the time that he was doing it.Ìý And if you imagine he’s ringing a bell that probably weighs 10 or 12 hundredweight, he’s ringing it for nearly four hours continuously, you have to catch the rope at the right time, you have to let go of it at the right time, you have to listen for your place amongst all the other bells and if you go wrong you don’t have the visual clues that sighted ringers have to help you to get right again.Ìý So, it was quite remarkable performances that he was putting in.Ìý We know he died in 1777 and as was the custom amongst the ringers in Cambridge they immediately rang, what they called, a dumb peal, in other words with the bells muffled, for his death.

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Music

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The bell ringers in the 18th century in Cambridge were a pretty remarkable lot, they included the professor of fossils at the University and various other notables, including James Gifford, who was twice mayor of the town.Ìý But it’s notable that every time a performance was published in the local newspapers, with John Ingersoll in it, it was Ingersoll that they drew attention to.Ìý Clearly, they were all very impressed with his ability, they wanted the world to know about it.Ìý So, for me, he’s one of the more remarkable ringers, not just in Cambridge, but probably in the whole country in the 18th century.

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Music

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White

And that music, William Byrd’s The Bells, arranged by Mark Kroll for Canadian Brass.

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More forgotten heroes please.Ìý And the next few weeks may throw up a few more.Ìý Well do tell us about them or indeed anything else that you wish to share about the current situation.Ìý You can leave us a voice message on 0161 8361338.Ìý You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk or go to our website, and that’s bbc.co.uk/intouch from where you can also download tonight’s and previous editions of the programme.

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Well that’s it from me, Peter White, and producer Kevin Core.Ìý Stay safe.Ìý Goodbye.

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