Alex – Interview 04b  

Alex – Interview 04b

Age at Interview: 28
Sex: Female
Age at Diagnosis: 3
Background: Alex is unemployed and single. Ethnic background/nationality: British

Brief outline:Alex was diagnosed with classic autism aged three years old. She lives independently in an adapted house, with some care assistance. A few years ago she was injured in a road accident and, as a result, now has epilepsy.

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Alex’s new carers didn’t notice that she hadn’t eaten for 13 days when she first lived on her own.

 



It started off really badly. I just transitioned from the learning disability team to the mental health team, because apparently if you haven’t got an IQ below 70 then the learning disability team can’t finance your stuff. So the only way I could get funding was to go into the mental health team, and that happened in September. I began living on my own in October. And, and I didn’t eat for thirteen days because there was no one around to cook for me, and although the mental health team were sending people in to check on me two or three times a day, no one bothered to ask if I’d eaten. So, it was 13 days before somebody realised that I hadn’t actually eaten, by which point I was actually getting pretty unwell. 

So I actually went from like October to March. I think between October and March I ate 13 cooked meals. We worked it out and it was all, the only time I eat those was when I was with my day centre. Going out and doing stuff so that was pretty awful. There was things like sorting out medication because my carer would always go and collect my prescriptions. And things like that. And everybody kind of like forgot that I took regular medication. I managed to sort that out myself by using an online pharmacy by Lloyds but again I did end up going like a couple of weeks without any medication, which when you’ve got epilepsy isn’t really very good.

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