Makereta Brown
I have had Essential Tremor since I was in my teens. Essential Tremor (ET) causes parts of the body to shake when you are doing an activity. As opposed to a Parkinsons tremor, the tremor associated with ET goes away when the body is at rest. In New Zealand, ET is thought to affect 1-5% of the population. My tremor primarily affects muscles in my right fore, middle and ring fingers. The fine motor control in my dominant hand has been deteriorating for decades.
I was top of English in Year 13, but I botched my end of year internal. On that day, for the first time, my writing hand would not hold the pen. I remember having to grip my writing hand with the other hand just to hold the pen steady. I didn’t finish the questions in the exam because I ran out of time. I put that first experience down to stress. That month I had started working with a counsellor. Eventually, the decades revealed that the incremental physical destabilisation was not caused by childhood sexual abuse or adoption issues. Emotional turmoil acts upon ET in the way a speaker amplifies feedback. While not creating the physical condition in itself, stress can certainly intensify the shaking impulses when an individual’s cerebellum, thalamus, and motor cortex circuits happen to be incorrectly rigged for smooth precise movement.
I learned to work around the nuisance somewhat. Most sufferers are diagnosed with ET in their 40s or later, but a few of us develop the condition when very young. [Read more…] about The Thief: My experience of Essential Tremor
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?
Nearly everyone wants to know the ‘secret’ to longevity. Several years ago, on his 107th birthday, Jack Coe (at that time the oldest man in New Zealand) declared that the secret was ‘popcorn and beer’. Hastings centenarian Vi Cassin, born in 1924, gave her answer as ‘onions and beer’. I would like to meet her, not only to find out whether she consumes these two items separately or together, but also because she is a pianist. As a pianist myself, I regularly work with retirement village choirs and have become increasingly intrigued by centenarian musicians. Is part of the ‘secret’ to longevity contained in their musicianship?