Featured image: Audrey Thomson (right) with Co.As.It. Community Services coordinator Belinda Colless.

Healthy@home clients share their diverse life stories

AUDREY Thomson is no stranger to financial hardship, grief and family turmoil. An asthmatic with chronic back pain, she will be 66 in June and says it is only now that she can relax and enjoy a better quality of life. Thanks to Co.As.It. Community Services she receives assistance with meal preparation and cleaning and can get out and about without the anxiety of how much it will cost.

“I’m not having to worry about finances which has a been a problem for years,” she says.

A country girl, Audrey has lived in many parts of Queensland, spending much of her childhood travelling around as her father followed his work, first as a drover and later building dams with the Irrigation and Water Supply Commission.

Born in Nambour on the Sunshine Coast, she grew up in the Burnett region – her dad worked on the Wuruma Dam at Eidsvold – and attended high school at Boonah. She left home at 16, and became a nurse at the Ipswich General Hospital.

“I loved it. I would go back tomorrow if I could,” Audrey says, “but I left after three years when I married a man who turned out to be full of alcohol and abuse.”

She had three children and a fourth child to her second partner, who was also abusive. She took the children to Melbourne where she raised them on her own. But then, in another quirk of fate, she lost everything, including the photos of her children, and had to start again.

Eight years ago, Audrey was living in Mackay when her second youngest son visited and told her how much she meant to him, despite the setbacks of their lives, so it was a particularly hard blow when he was killed in a motorcycle accident in January this year. He was 42.

Her youngest son took his own life six and a half years ago. It was just before the anniversary of his death that she decided it was time to leave her public housing home in Mackay and return south.

She moved to a two-bedroom housing commission unit in the Brisbane area, where she has been living alone ever since.
When she turned 65 last year, Audrey became eligible for services through My Aged Care and was introduced to Co.As.It.

“My quality of life has been much improved by the services I am now able to access and I don’t have to wonder where I am going to get the money,” she says.

“It gets me out of the unit. I have two hours a week, but make it a social outing for four hours every second week, so I can go shopping…we don’t have many big shops other than supermarkets here,” Audrey said.

She’s no longer confined to a small town and relishes the opportunity to get out and see new things.

Audrey buys the ingredients for her meals and then has a helper come in each week for two hours to help with preparation. Meals are frozen and re-heated as she needs them during the week.

“I can’t stand at a bench for that long because of my back. It’s agony to even stand up,” she said.

Co.As.It. has also organised for her to have help with the cleaning – sweeping, vacuuming and mopping, all the things around the home that she is unable to do herself.

She sees the same crew every week and has been able to establish a relationship with them.

Her other help has come from the Harvest Point Church where she has made friends who look out for her. Someone always comes to take her to church on Sunday and Bible classes on Wednesday nights.

“I have become reliant on my church family,” she says. “I’ve got my services and my church friends. They are my family now. I’m not moving.”

Audrey also keeps herself busy with what she can manage – knitting, crochet and a spot of gardening and also finds peace working on her adult colouring books.

“My quality of life has become good, other than the back pain,” she says. “Co.As.It. has made a real difference to me. Life is looking up.”

And, she adds, “it’s about time.”

---

The Aged Care Diversity Framework

The Aged Care Diversity Framework aims to ensure a high quality aged care system that embraces the diverse characteristics and life experiences of consumers. Older people with diverse needs. characteristics and life experiences may be part of a group or multiple groups that may have encountered exclusion, discrimination and stigma during their lives.

The above article is part of a series that tells the real life stories of healthy@home clients. It has has been approved for publishing by the service provider and client.