conversations about medicine and life

Living in the A zone

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McMullan family Sunflower Judging Day
McMullan family Sunflower Judging Day

Kaitrin McMullan

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I had the good fortune, as a storyteller and dabbler in the arts, to be able to give up poorly-paid work and move into a kind of early retirement … albeit with an elderly dependent. Swapping poverty for poverty, not too hard! The rational was that we (my partner and I) would move in and care for Mum while her brain still lived at the same address as her body, in order to make the most of these precious years, much as some people decide to devote time to their children’s  early years, only in reverse. Luckily Mum’s disease has progressed very slowly and in a benign way, and we now find ourselves in a four-generation “compound” with family living next door and a rainbow gate connecting the two houses.

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In the poppy corridors

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Graham Matrix

Today at work I arrived early, changed my shirt, tied my hair. I ate an apple in the break room before handover at four o’clock. It’s time to go, three of us carers on this shift. In the nurses’ station we get a list and a walkie talkie.

Then we’re off and running. Nurse reminds me not to leave towels in the sluice room. That’s fine – I can definitely not do that. I go up the No.2 Wing, get my bearings for the shift ahead, reminding everyone to come to dinner at five o’clock, pulling curtains and closing doors.

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Advance Care Planning: What matters to you?

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Helen Sawyer

Advanced Care Planning On Thursday 5 April, New Zealanders will be encouraged to think about, talk about, and plan for their future and end-of-life care.  Advance Care Planning Day (previously known as Conversations that Count Day) is coordinated by the Health Quality & Safety Commission. It is an ideal time to talk to your whānau/family and others close to you about things like:

  • what type of care you would like towards the end of your life;
  • where would you want to be cared for if you could no longer care for yourself;
  • any particular worries you have about being ill or dying.

You should also talk to your GP or other health care professionals about the medical choices you might have to face in the future.

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“When the body shrinks, the spirit grows”

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Jan FitzGerald

I fell into becoming a professional caregiver after caring 24/7 for a terminally ill husband with a brain tumour. Needing to pay funeral expenses, all savings exhausted in the fight for his life, I was weary of having been turned down for jobs as “too qualified” and so settled for $9.50 an hour in a private hospital/rest home, where I worked as many shifts as I could. On account of age and life experience (having had three children and nursed ailing elderly parents and husband), my roster was soon changed from downstairs Rest Home to upstairs Palliative Care.

I felt very comfortable there. There is an honesty of heart shared by poets and the terminally ill. Words and emotions are not wasted. Often, as a qualified grief counsellor, I was asked to stay behind after a death on the shift to “talk with family,” but I think the best contribution I made was to listen. Really listen.

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This place called old age

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Sue Wootton

Renée
Renée

Renée is one of New Zealand’s most admired playwrights and novelists, the author of eight novels and over twenty plays. She writes direct, clear-sighted social histories, threaded through with humour and with forthright tenderness. Her stories often follow strong, capable women carving good lives for themselves and their dependents in the face of hardship or injustice. I was privileged last week to be present at the Dunedin launch of her memoir, These Two Hands. In person, and on the page, Renée is witty, irreverent, intelligent, moving and utterly inspiring. I defy you to read her memoir and not want to claim your own life with words, passion and delight. These Two Hands is a tonic and a treasure, like its author. Here, from These Two Hands, is Renée on “being old”:

Being old. What’s it like? How does it feel? How do you do it? There are no maps, no guidelines, you have to make your own way. A lot depends on your idea of what being old means. I had no examples in my family because they nearly all died early, and Puti Mary, who lived to seventy-three, and Emmanuel, ninety-three, were before my time. Although they could only have told me how they managed, not how I should.

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Ageing poetically

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Janet Wainscott

Gary Glazner
Gary Glazner and Poetry Project participant

Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.

I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.

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‘Withstanding’ by Helen Jacobs

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Sue Wootton

‘Withstanding’ by Helen JacobsAt almost 90, Christchurch poet, lifelong environmentalist, tramper and gardener, and former Eastbourne mayor Elaine Jakobsson (pen name Helen Jacobs) has published a new poetry collection with the wonderful title Withstanding.

There are a multitude of ways to stand, all of which nourish the theme of the collection: age. Withstanding takes a clear-eyed look at the joys and difficulties of standing up, standing down, standing with, standing for, taking a stand, longstanding, understanding and, most of all, how to stand it.

Writing poems, for me, is a way of thinking about my life and interpreting it, summarising it, and as I age so my poetry takes on different themes, which might or might not be relevant to others who are also aging … I am always delighted when others find something in them.” Elaine Jakobsson (aka Helen Jacobs)

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