Aukje de Vries' Diary Day 9

I begin the day with a dentist’s appointment, the first of a long series. I am there for an hour and leave the practice with a funny feeling in my head. When I get home I first hang around and watch some TV before I feel well enough to go upstairs to my study and do some work.I have to write the minutes of last Friday’s teleconference and to do some of the tasks that we decided on. I start with it and then want to look at some of the papers of the General Assembly last November to which we referred in the teleconference. I used them while preparing the agenda and realised at the time that the file (neatly sorted out in a blue folder) contained some papers which I did not have on my computer and of which I had no other copy. So I thought I’d better be careful. I look for the folder but it is not there. Not on my desk, not in the filing cabinet, not in the piles of paper that sit on a couch, not in the document boxes, not in the piles in the book case. Because I have cleared my desk last week I wonder whether by any chance they are among the papers I want to throw away. These are downstairs in three huge piles, waiting to be collected. I go through them No luck. I look in all the same places once again. I try to think if they can be anywhere else in the house, I look in the living room. No blue folder, no papers. It drives me crazy. This is not possible. But the file is gone. I lose about two hours and finally get back to my minutes. I also check my email and find an interesting message. It comes from AGE, the European Older People’s Platform. They are invited by the European Commission to participate in a peer review of long-term care in The Netherlands. There is a basic paper by the Dutch Ministry of Health explaining Dutch long-term care, there is a draft commentary by AGE and there is some info about the procedure.AGE asks its members to comment on the papers. This is my chance!! I have great misgivings about what the government has done to long-term care over the past few years. I have sent letters to newspapers but they have not been published, I have sent a message to my seniors’ organisation, but I did not get much feedback, so this is an opportunity to make my opinion heard. I’ll read the stuff tonight so that I can start writing tomorrow. I’ll have to change my priorities.