Jim's Quality of Life OnLine

(NB: This post was written by Jim Vickers-Willis a few days before his passing on December 30th 2008)

Great philosopher and psychologist Dr Francis Macnab, the Minister of St Michaels Church, Collins Street, and head of the Cairmillar Institute, urges church leaders to make their religion more relevant to our 21s' century times - "searching for good replacing dogma".

Can one imagine that God is in favour of multi millions of people starving?

Should our religious leaders have a rethink? Should the world's religions be supporting comprehensive sex education, contraception and abortion? At present the world has 6.5 billion people, with millions starving and lacking adequate water. We also have climate change problems and the population predicted to increase very rapidly.

Are religious leaders simply hanging onto useless dogma and hiding behind the word "moral"? Is there anything moral about deliberately promoting a situation where, in the not too far distant future, multi multi millions of people may be engaged in wars, fighting one another for water and food?

Good on you Dr Macnab.

Yours Faithfully

Jim Vickers-Willis
CEO - Quality Of Life Online
Visit Jim’s web site at www.vickers-willis.com

This blog post was written by Jim two weeks prior to his passing on December 30th.

It was way back in May 1954 and the radio broadcast of the Queen's visit was interspersed with the broadcast of square dancing from Centennial Hall where I was calling the dancing for some hundreds of square dancers. The polio was starting to show; my voice was starting to crack as I sang the last number "Somebody Stole My Girl".

Next day in the Reporters' Room at The Advertiser newspaper, as I wrote my weekly square dance column I found that the first finger on my right hand would not press the typewriter keys. In the afternoon I was flown back to Melbourne - and straight into Fairfield Hospital and the iron lung.

The next day I saw the main story on the front page of The Sun newspaper in big print "Vickers-Willis Polio Suspect."

Blimey!

Now here I am writing about having polio - 54 years down the track at a place called VASS where I am spending a week of respite while my wife has a much needed holiday. VASS stands for Ventilator Accommodation Support Service. It also means Clarendon House 335 Clarendon Street Thornbury. It is a place all Victorians can be proud of.

VASS provides short term (respite) accommodation and long term accommodation for people with breathing problems often caused by polio, motor neurone disease and muscular dystrophy. One of the problems is a thing called post polio syndrome which means that the polio problem tends to return in later life.

You can't do much in life if you can't breathe, and these people at Clarendon House are doing a really magnificent job, making life as comfortable and secure as possible for the patients.
Staff here tell me that at present that there are more than 600 people in Victoria requiring respiratory support. I could imagine what a shambles it would cause in our hospitals if these people had to go to hospital to have their special needs met. As it is, most of them are able to have their needs met at home. The Department of Human Resources underwrites the Victorian Respiratory Support Service headed up by Ms Anne Duncan. This service provides ventilator machines to people in their own homes - so that they can stay at home instead of being in hospital. These machines are provided free of charge and are serviced without charge - most efficiently by all accounts. Many of the ventilator users only need their ventilators at night - so that they can get a good night's sleep, and go about life normally without a ventilator. But some patients need a ventilator day and night.

At Clarendon House you see all stages - from those who use the ventilator only at night to June Middleton the world famous iron lung patient who has been in the iron lung continuously for the past 59 years. June's cheerful spirit is an inspiration to all. This week Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who will be age 100 on February the 8th, pulled out some plants, at her place on Cruden Farm, and sent them across to June Middleton - where they were planted in June's garden outside her window. She can see the plants from her iron lung.

It's not much fun having polio, but it would be much worse without this support. Clarendon House sometimes is the end of the road. Not everyone can have a wife or a husband or members of their family to look after them so that they can remain in their home until they die. Although that is what we all hope for, it's not always the way it works out. It's always great to see the staff of Clarendon House providing friendship and comfort and making the best end of life experience possible for these people who are suffering disabilities, which can affect any one of us in the community.

So often we hear complaints about Government inadequacy, but, having had polio for 54 years, I can attest to the great Government support and services - a credit to the Department of Human Resources, the Victorian Respiratory Services, Yooralla, amongst others - providing long term caring for these polio and similar victims.

Where did I get my title for this article?

In Western Australia my wife and a carer called Rosy were helping me to shower - when I slipped. As they saved me, I said "I have just thought of the title for my article about polio -"In the shower with two girls - and all that!". Much laughter. The next day a small present arrived from carer Rosy. The card said: "From the other girl in the shower!"

Yours faithfully,

Jim Vickers-Willis
Author of "The Magic of Life". (Sid Harta Publishers)

This comment was written by Jim on 24 December 2008 – 6 days prior to his passing.

The twinkling "diamond" lights on the tree outside my home in Brighton are solar powered.

The solar panel for these lights is about the size of two match boxes and sits on the fence facing the sun. When it is a sunny day, the lights will shine at night for about 8 hours. If it is a cloudy day, they may only shine for about 2 hours.

The string of lights is light sensitive. It automatically turns on the lights at dusk and turns them off again automatically at sunrise.

The lights require no electrical connection and appear to come to no harm out in the weather.

In these days of climate change electricity restrictions, is this the way many of our Christmas night displays should be going?

Cheers,

Jim Vickers-Willis
Visit Jim's website at www.vickers-willis.com

When are we going to get real value for the almost half a billion dollars we spend per annum keeping prisoners in jail in Victoria?

We need an incentive Education System - a system designed to provide the best education facilities, aimed particularly at giving the prisoners skills which will help them obtain future employment. Combined with this an incentive that a prisoner who passes various exams or acquires certain skills, will gain remission of part of his sentence by his hard work. About half of the prisoners have backgrounds of multiple and related serious disadvantage, including unemployment and homelessness.

If we set up the right system, it will not be long before employers are looking for "early release men" - knowing that they are going to get an employee who has been working hard to gain special employment skills.

These prisoners need our support and help to help them become useful citizens - instead of just re-offending and going back into jail which is the case so often today.

Get them educated and get them out as quick as possible.

Best Wishes,

Jim Vickers-Willis

You are invited to visit our web site at:
www.vickers-willis.com

Choice is very important, particularly in old age, and, at age 90, I am seeing the worries which are afflicting so many senior citizens - some of which can be minimised by their own right choices and some of which urgently require the right legislation to remove these worries.

First Worry:

Will I be able to afford to pay my health insurance premiums or will I be left without health cover just at the time I need it most?

I'm lucky enough to have a War Service Gold Card which enables me to have the best medical and hospital service free. What a blessing. It's not just the treatment, because I have been lucky enough to have very little, but what is important is that I have not had to worry about it at all. Why should not a Gold Card be available to everyone say over the age of 80 years? At the election before last, a similar suggestion was quickly crushed as far too expensive for us to afford. I ask: "How come it is too expensive when it is for us - all of us? We are the people who are going to need it and worry about it and suffer. It is a benefit for everyone because we are all going to get old." Some say it would be abused but isn't that just a matter of simply using our brains to organise the system correctly so that it is impossible to abuse? . But this benefit for us all will only happen when people realise the huge benefit available to them personally, and start to work for it.

Worry Number Two:

Will I run out of money before I die?

By a stroke of the pen, the last Australian Government crushed a great benefit (the Annuity Assets Test Exemption) which was easing this problem. I was a Certified Financial Planner before I retired at age 87, and I put a great deal of my clients' retirement funds into lifetime annuities with CPI indexing. This meant the husband and wife received indexed income payments monthly until both of them were dead . This annuity was not counted as an asset under the Assets Test which meant they received the full pension. For many quite modest retiree clients, very often it meant they would receive over $900 per week total income. This helped the local economy because, instead of the retirees being on miserable pensions, they were reasonable spending citizens. I found that, amongst other things, this encouraged couples to put their money into producing an ongoing income rather than spending it on overseas trips, etc. Originally that was one of the reasons the lifetime annuity exemption law was put in place.

The new Australian Government should immediately restore the Assets Test Lifetime Annuities Exemption. In the overall financial picture, I believe the cancelling of this benefit probably costs more than it saves - and particularly it costs retirees a lot of unnecessary worry.

Worry Number Three:

When I was a polio patient in an iron lung, the medical prognosis for me was that I had a fighting chance of getting out of the iron lung. Alongside me were two friends Les and Bill. On them the prognosis was that they would die in the iron lung. When you are in the iron lung your feet and hands are enclosed in the box. If a fly lands on your nose, you can't knock it off, or scratch your ear. You are alive, but there is very little chance for enjoyment of life. I saw these two suffer this for years and then each one died. Despite the ifs and buts about euthanasia, I felt there should be a clear legal position where a person can say to their doctor "I have had enough". The worry so many people have about what might happen at their death can be removed immediately by correct and carefully constructed legislation giving a choice..

Worry Number Four:

Living in a three-bedroom villa in a magnificent retirement village, Classic Residences (Brighton) - where there are about 400 residents - one finds that those who have a partner with them are regarded as the lucky ones. The thing they fear most is losing their partner. Isn't this the message we should be sending out to all our marrying and divorcing young ones? I am one of the lucky ones - we have been married for 61 years - and to young ones reading this I'm saying "go for it! Do everything possible to make your long relationship work because later on this will add greatly to your quality of life."

So here are the worries, the choices - and the solutions. Are we going to make sure they are available so that hundreds of thousands of older people can stop worrying and improve their quality of life?

Best Wishes,

JIM VICKERS-WILLIS
Author of "The standard Australian Square Dance" (Rigby, 1953), "Are You (Really) Fun To Live With?" (A best seller, 1974), and "The Magic of Life" (Sid Harta publishers), just published.

You are invited to visit our web site at:
www.vickers-willis.com