We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective or creative work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.
The boot that is held on the throat of Māori and Pacific people is stubbornly resistant to attempts to shift it.’
– Professor Peter Crampton
I understood very little about the root causes of bad health before starting work in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago’s Wellington School of Medicine. I had managed to complete a small clinical trial examining the impact of diabetes on lower-limb function for my doctoral thesis, without ever having to consider why I was spending most of my time recruiting patients in clinics around South Auckland, or why nearly all the recruits were either Māori or Pasifika.
My first weeks in the Department were heady. I had moved from a laboratory that studied diseases and their causes in silo, to an environment that considered most diseases as symptoms of one underlying cause: the social determinants of health. Coming to grips with this link was crucial to my acceptance in my new public health world. I needed to learn quickly. [Read more…] about Tangata Tiriti
Looking at myself in the mirror who is it,
Who is that lopsided stranger
Washing up and down the shore
Patricia Goedicke, from ‘Now Only One of Us Remains’
In 2023, I had a mastectomy. When I left the hospital, I was given a Dacron-stuffed soft fabric oval pad to use as a temporary prothesis for when I was able to wear bras again. It reminded me of the rolled-up pairs of socks that some girls used to stuff in their bras at high school – and of the other girls talking disparagingly about ‘falsies’. It was a few days until I was brave enough to look at myself in the mirror. When I did, it was an extraordinary feeling. A strip of surgical tape lay across the left side of my chest, which was now … empty. When I looked down, I could see my stomach sticking out. As many women also experience, it was hard enough to love my own body before I had surgery, but now I was wondering if I could love my asymmetrical body. Is it okay to love a scarred, one-breasted body, or should I book myself onto the waiting list for reconstructive surgery, ASAP? [Read more…] about Being Asymmetrical
Early in his memoir Native Son: The writer’s memoir, Witi Ihimaera introduced me to the idea that stories have a whakapapa. I had an image of a story travelling through generations of tellers and listeners, told in different places: a dinner table, a classroom, a wharenui, a road trip or perhaps as a whisper in a bed. And I imagine each teller and listener moulds that story into something that makes sense to them in their time and place.
I was recently told a metaphorical sort of story by my friend, the thoughtful and passionate GP, Nigel Thompson. It was a story that had been told to him by Richard Bolstad, who had been given the story by psychotherapist George Sweet. I don’t know Richard Bolstad at all, but if he is someone who passed a story from George to Nigel, I feel I would like him a lot.
When you have treatment for cancer, information sometimes comes to you in a sideways fashion and not from the direction you expect. It didn’t seem weird, then, that it was from a newspaper article that I first learnt about the benefits of physical exercise during and after cancer treatment. The article detailed the closure of Expinkt, a gym and exercise programme that had been established by Associate Professor Lynnette Jones, a researcher in the field of Exercise Oncology. Expinkt was run by the University of Otago School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences from 2009 until November 2021 (when funding dried up). During that time, the article said, the programme had treated hundreds of people with cancer, mostly breast cancer survivors. Now it was going to re-establish itself as The Wellness Gym, a not-for-profit in new facilities outside the university.
I was fortunate to be accepted into The Wellness Gym programme in July 2022, fourteen months after successful surgery to remove a large sarcoma from my thigh. In the period following surgery I had basically redefined myself as ‘disabled’. Along with my tumour, my hamstrings had been removed, and my mobility and flexibility had suffered enormously. I had gone from walking 60-90 minutes a day on Dunedin’s Signal Hill tracks to shuffling along, unable to raise my knee or lift my foot more than a few inches from the ground. I was unable to perform the simplest tasks: crouching to pick objects off the ground, negotiating uneven ground and steps. Many things I wanted to do – like getting on a bike, or straddling barriers such as stiles – were impossible. I could not reach below my right calf, so pulling on trousers or putting on shoes was difficult. Surgery had left me with nerve pain, scar tissue and oedema: the feeling that my leg had been hollowed out and then repacked with damp and heavy kapok and stitched back together, like an old teddy bear. [Read more…] about The Wellness Gym
After three and a half years in hibernation, Corpus is back. We will soon be publishing some fresh posts. The site has remained online since we went into hiatus in March 2021 and still attracts several hundred visitors each month reading the back-posts.
We are now under the banner of Otago University Press. With the assistance of University of Otago Humanities Internship programme, we are looking forward to publishing new pieces on a semi-regular basis.
Whether you are a subscriber or a casual reader, we hope you will enjoy the new material as well as our archive, and recommend the site to others.
Last month I visited the hospital. Even when the reasons are straightforward, the experience is never without echoes.
Frame #1:
I am sitting in the café in Wellington Hospital’s atrium. From my table I can see an inner courtyard of tables and chairs and a sculpture of arches and lintel. The sculpture is actually a section of the old hospital entranceway, a familiar sight from when I was admitted as a child. But I am not a child. In this frame I am a poet, the writer of My Wide White Bed, a book of poems about being in hospital. Today I am here to talk to a staff member about the possibility of framing some of them for display in hospital corridors. Poems that will ring a little bell for today’s inpatients: We have a voice; you are seen. That’s what they’ll trill. Well, that’s the hope.
Frame #2:
After the café meeting, I head to my orthopaedic outpatient’s appointment. In this frame I am a patient. I answer the prioritisation form, trying to make my life fit onto a sliding scale. All I want is a referral to Orthotics, who have made my shoes for the past twenty-five years.
The registrar comes in, offers a smile and handshake. He examines my hands, says good tendons, fingers not crooked. Surgeries? Hips, four, I say, two revisions. He moves to my feet. Flat feet, he says, stiff. What about pain? Difficult to get around? I’ve adapted, I say, it’s different for someone whose life has been upended recently or for whom it keeps changing. I’ve had this for fifty-two years. I know how to do it.
Afterwards I think, why did I go on about coping? A friend says, he was looking at you through one frame and you were trying to get him to look through another.
When you have treatment for cancer, information sometimes comes to you in a sideways fashion and not from the direction you expect. It didn’t seem weird, then, that it was from a newspaper article that I first learnt about the benefits of physical exercise during and after cancer treatment. The article detailed the closure of Expinkt, a gym and exercise programme that had been established by Associate Professor Lynnette Jones, a researcher in the field of Exercise Oncology. Expinkt was run by the University of Otago School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences from 2009 until November 2021 (when funding dried up). During that time, the article said, the programme had treated hundreds of people with cancer, mostly breast cancer survivors. Now it was going to re-establish itself as The Wellness Gym, a not-for-profit in new facilities outside the university.
