A disabled Walworth mum with prolapsed discs and no feeling in her legs feels “doomed” because her housing association said they would not move her to a ground-floor flat, even though she can’t use the stairs.
Odete Figueira Rufino Pires, 42, of Rosa Parks House, Munton Road, has nightmares of burning alive because if there is a fire, and the lifts break, there would be no escape.
Housebound, unable to work, and rarely going outside in case the lifts are broken when she returns, she says her housing association Peabody have refused her rehousing application.
Odete said: “I’ve always been a tough person and a lot has happened to me in the past but I just can’t continue being strong and trying. Nobody cares. I feel like a nobody. Even if you fight and you’re strong it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Odete’s health deteriorated in 2018 when, then a bus driver, she experienced dizzy spells when checking her mirrors.
One day, her spinal discs collapsed and she began struggling to walk. In December 2020, Odete was hospitalised again.
In rehab, it was clear her legs weren’t working: “I was in the pool and couldn’t move my legs and I started to scream. I felt so desperate and thought ‘this is it’.”
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She says she asked Peabody to move her to a ground floor flat in February 2021 but they couldn’t during the Covid-19 lockdown.
In August 2021, she reapplied, attaching a form from her occupational therapist that said she was “housebound”, depressed, and “in chronic pain”.
It noted that, because her flat was not “disable adapted” she was paying for someone to do housework for her, which was impacting the family’s finances.
But in October, Peabody rejected her rehousing application, telling her it could be “months or years” before she would be moved and to consider “moving outside of London”.
She has considered appealing the decision but said: “They’re powerful, I’m not. They can get lawyers, I can’t. They’ve got money, I don’t.”
On Saturday, Thursday 28 April, she returned from her sister’s birthday at 11pm to find her lift was broken. The desperate mother had to sit in the dark outside her home until 4am before a technician finally came to repair the lift.
Odete also says her bathroom is ill-equipped for a disabled person and she needs help every time she washes, so can’t as often as she’d like.
When she leaves the house, she has to ask her nine-year-old daughter to check if she smells. She said: “I’m not proud of myself anymore.”
Though it has since been repaired, the block’s downstairs corridors used to regularly flood and pour into the electrical boxes, which Odete says was a fire hazard.
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She currently lives with her ex-partner, also her daughter’s father, who helps with childcare and financial support. She doesn’t know how she’ll cope if he leaves.
A Peabody spokesperson said: “Having visited Ms Pires this week to discuss her situation, it’s clear that we haven’t communicated with her as well as we should have done. She is understandably upset and needs our support to resolve a number of different issues.
“The recurring lift fault is a problem we need to solve as soon as possible and we have instructed a specialist engineer to investigate for us. We have also asked for Ms Pires’ medical priority to be reviewed urgently and our Head of Neighbourhoods in Southwark will now be a named person for her to speak to. The team is putting together an action plan to make sure she gets the help she needs going forward.”