Paul Trotman
How are you?
Are you OK?
How are you feeling?
When I was in my late teens I developed a real dislike for these phrases and I’ve had a love hate relationship with them ever since. I was quite a sickly teenager. On the first day of my last year of high school I was dragged screaming and kicking to the GP after a couple of mysterious vomiting episodes – the last straw being when I threw up at the dinner table. No warning, no nausea just bleeeuch: succulent flakes of baked fish all over the place.
The GP took one look and said ‘Aha, kidney failure’. Apparently, I was a classic case. I wondered how malfunctioning kidneys could make me throw up, as my basic knowledge of biology told me the kidneys and the gut weren’t connected. He explained that if the kidneys aren’t working, toxins build up in the body, which makes you vomit. I was sent for urgent blood tests. In the lift to the blood lab my dad told me the initials on the form – ESRF – stood for End Stage Renal Failure. Uh-oh. [Read more…] about Life with kidney disease and dialysis
My son and I stand on the corner of Frederick and Great King Streets in Dunedin. He is wearing seven strings of beads around his neck and holding a blue collection bucket. His necklace is so heavy it makes his neck ache, so he didn’t put it on until we reached our designated spot. The hospital looms above us, blotting light from the pavement below. But, here on our corner, the sun shines.
I’ve often wondered what speciality I’d have chosen, if not haematology. Somehow, I keep looping back to psychiatry, which is odd, as I certainly wasn’t drawn to the discipline as a medical student. And yet, fascinated by the combination of art and science, I’d earned A+s and As in my psychology papers in first-year university. It’s increasingly clear that the mind and body are inextricably entwined, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part. Perhaps, at the time, psychiatry was far too close to home, with too many reminders of my own family’s mental health history – schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and a depression so severe that it ended my brother’s life at 21. 
I have been telling stories for as long as I can remember, but I was nine when I started writing them down. The first one was a blatant plagiarism of a Jacqueline Wilson novel, and after that I never looked back (though I did start coming up with my own ideas). Each story, each poem, was a masterpiece to me, perfect simply because it existed and because I enjoyed making it exist. Writing made me feel competent, powerful, capable of building something from nothing; there was a magic to it that I never found anywhere else. I knew that I would be an author someday, that I was supposed to be one. How could I not?