Richard Anderson
“I want some help with a friend of mine because she has mental health problems and you have your own lived experience of mental health issues.”
The whispers of the past pick holes inside me as the conversation continues and I despair, as I listen to my friend’s story, that another person, somewhere out there, has to go through this stuff.
“Does she have a good relationship with her GP? Does she do the basics right? The eating, sleeping and exercising bit? Does she have any drug issues with alcohol or other drugs? What is her support network like? Are her family and friends close? Does she have a job, money coming in? Does she live alone or with people?
[Read more…] about The conversation that includes everything
For any medical student, there’s something quite hard to forget about walking into the anatomy lab for the very first time. My shoes squeaked against the blue linoleum floor as I wove my way through rows of grey body bags lying on stainless steel trolleys under that harsh fluorescent white light. What I found challenging about my first encounter with a corpse was that it was so undeniably and certainly human. Structurally there was not much difference between me and the body that lay on the trolley.
How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.
In autumn I began cutting back the Japanese anemones as they finished blooming. Then I became ill again and the last few still in flower were left to look after themselves. The flowers fell, the tips of the canes where they had been turning to white cotton. This held a novelty for a while, but then they began to look shabby.
