conversations about medicine and life
Ian Anderson
I punch in the code to get into work, and go to put my dinner in the office. Mrs O stands blocking the doorway. “Excuse me dear, I need to get in there for a minute.”
“Piss off, I’m not going anywhere with you.”
What a great start to my shift.
Sue Wootton
From memory, for memory, and in memory.
I used to have a physiotherapy clinic in central Dunedin. One Friday evening I farewelled my final patient and began to tidy up before heading home. It had been a busy week and I was exhausted. Already mentally off-duty, I wandered into the waiting room to stack the magazines, and to my surprise and annoyance found two men sitting there. In an American drawl, one of them said, “My friend here needs an appointment.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the clinic is closed.”
The man persisted. “This is very important,” he said. “He needs an appointment now.”
I glanced at the friend. He was certainly holding himself rigidly, as if in pain. But the very idea of treating one more patient that day was too much for me. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but I am closing now.”
The man amped up his appeal. It’s urgent; it’s necessary; it has to be done and you have to do it.
Sue Wootton
How can we use language to talk about not having language?”
This question held poet Liz Breslin in its grip for the several years it took to write the poems that appear in her first – terrific – collection. The book’s title, Alzheimer’s and a Spoon, encompasses the themes woven through the poems. On the one hand there is a beloved grandmother’s illness, and her gradual loss of memory and language through Alzheimer’s disease. On (or in) the other hand, there is a spoon, and all the nourishment implied by spoons and spooning: physical, emotional and spiritual.
Breslin’s collection probes the bonds between memory, language and identity. It explores a resonating question: What happens to the present and the future if we forget the past?
Janet Wainscott
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.
Liz Breslin
Some people process the world through paycheques, others through the haircuts on their neighbours, or the shoes they look down at or the latest thing the Internet says. As a writer I process relentlessly through words and words and words.
So when my grandmother, on the other side of the world, started her decline into Alzheimer’s, it was her language, or rather, the sudden and marked change in it, that drew me in to the pathos of her story. She’d grown up speaking Polish, using English as a second language and England as a refuge at the conclusion of the Second World War. Her English disappeared first, fast. Her Polish came forth, lingered.