M. L. E. Brown
In the past ten months, my husband, his sister, and I have moved my husband’s parents – first one, and then the other – into different wings of the same managed aged-care facility. We then had to sell their Northland home, built by my in-laws and only reluctantly abandoned after fifty-five years of married life. When settlement finally eventuated, we had a few frantic days to travel to Northland and clear out the house. All this has occurred during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. My husband’s job at Auckland Airport dictated strictly no close contact with either his father or his sister (as she was helping their father move into the retirement village). Auckland’s second lock-down was announced three days into the final push, my husband was recalled to work, and the whole thing ended in a terrific rush.
Having moved my own mother out of her home just before she died eighteen years ago, I know this is never an easy process for any family. Then, however, I didn’t have to wear PPE and masks, stay in motels, and refrain from hugging my parent when she was most distressed. I didn’t move my mother with any notion of not being allowed to visit her again, or aware that I’d be expressly excluded from attending her funeral. These were all realities my husband faced, and faces, with regard to both his parents in these uncertain times. Covid-19 has certainly added some unkind twists to all of our everyday situations.
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has been described, perhaps accurately, as a one-in-one-hundred-years event, but during its history New Zealand has a number of “scares” and lockdowns because of infectious diseases that have had detrimental impacts on Māori. In 2020, the memory of these epidemics has led some Māori communities to attempt to 
Eight weeks post-op, a simple procedure to inject Botox into my pelvic floor and I was done with the pain. During a trip to town to see the GP (again), a 40-minute drive with a tennis ball under my nono, I’d felt a strong urge to scream. The pain was unbearable. After the GP I drove for another hour – my current idea of hell (the driving bit) because everything from my vagina down to my foot goes numb. I worked my shift at the library, and when I got home the bloody fire wouldn’t start. Let’s just say the fire copped an earful. Thankfully I live alone.
This is not how I imagined medical school. I thought it was going to have more cardiac arrests, more trauma and more helicopters. Instead, my days as a trainee intern are spent writing up discharge summaries for consultants who I mostly never see. We’re meant to have our own patients – take a history, examine and diagnose. But the hospital is saturated with junior medical staff and deficient in patients. I guess it’s not a bad thing. Ever since we found a way to treat disease by providing treatment specific to a patient’s genetic code we haven’t seen anywhere near the amount of patients that we used to. Well, so the consultants say. But still, I sometimes wish something big would happen.