ACCORDING to your report (LET, August 18), female employees at Burnley Town Hall are having a lot of days absence because of "stress." Something should be done, they say.

I will tell you about stress. I care for my 92-year-old, doubly incontinent mother. She is bedridden and suffers from horrendous bedsores and has morphine for the pain. She can do absolutely nothing for herself.

She has not known me for four years. I can only observe her discomfort and distress and do my utmost to make her comfortable. The stress caused by watching my mother, the best pal I will ever have, die like this, is torture with no hope of relief, waiting for the inevitable release of death.

I nurse her 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have just eight hours a week break. The emotional strain on me is so intense because there is no escape. That is stress.

Good luck to the town hall staff. I hope measures are in place to help them, but let's have some perspective here.

The word "carer" sounds so trite and almost nice. It is horrible. Being a "carer" is dirty, smelly and sweaty. It gets so bad sometimes I want to run away from it all, but I can't. A so-called "nursing home" neglected and abused my lovely mother so much that when I visited her, she was in a state of hypothermia (close to death through being kept too cold for a long time), her bottom resembled raw steak through sitting on the same incontinence pad for nine hours. They had her in their "care" for just six days.

Through that dreadful experience and because I dearly love her, I cannot alleviate my "stress" by putting her in a home. Because this would be condemning a lady who was caring, gentle, hardworking (two cleaning jobs at 77 years of age), contributing and selfless to suffer the fate of so many old people when they can no longer "contribute" and become unwanted in our shallow, greedy and selfish society.

Social services staff are excellent and do their very best with limited resources. The district nurse team is brilliant with the dressings and medical procedures, but they can do nothing to alleviate my "stress."

MICHELLE PICKERING (Mrs), Olympia Street, Burnley.

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