conversations about medicine and life

DrawThis! Hacking a way out of isolation

1 Comment

Liz Breslin

What do you do, with these limitations given to you?

It’s a question we’ve been variously asking ourselves these past weeks. There is no right answer. Not King Lear, not sourdough. But isn’t it interesting to notice where we go?

I went to a hackathon in week two of Level Four, I think it was, but pick a number, in these numbered times. I went because something I read said community and connection and because I was missing that and because I was scared to, so I did. A hackathon is a thing  where you tech together to create solutions. You have 48 hours to #HacktheCrisis. No pressure. Actually, lots of pressure. Time pressure. Confusion. What was I doing? I rumbled around in a #general zone until I found myself in a team of eight, six of us at our first hackathon, hacking the heck out of  an idea that made my heart sing.

[Read more…]

Mortality and me

3 Comments

Pam Morrison 

There is a book, a memoir by Wendy Parkins, that has been sitting on the fold-down oak hall table opposite my bedroom for over a month, in the appointed position for objects that are due for return. It didn’t beat the lock-down and so it sits, mute, uncannily prescient, and currently a triumphant personal declaration. Every morning, so far, I’m alive. For now.

The book’s title has captured a potent truth. For here I am, self-protecting by order, sealed in my home in a transformed world, where every morning I hear of tens of thousands more who are no longer alive. They are the mounting daily toll of the dead. This is news to no one, yet as I read it again, punched into words on my computer, I find myself reeling. Just two months ago, I sat under the canopy of a sprawling sycamore at the bach, encircled by friends. From memory, no-one made mention of the plague that was to come. We simply had no idea.

Right now there are now more people in lock-down than were alive during World War 2. I’m sharing the experience of confinement with 2.6 billion other humans. I find this out on Google, as I flail for information that will anchor this experience for me. But of course that doesn’t anchor me at all. If anything I feel even more unmoored, less able to situate myself in relation to anything I once knew to be true. The big picture has lost its edges.

[Read more…]

On not being Ashley

26 Comments

Lucy O’Hagan

It’s 5 April, 2020. The country is in lockdown. Waiting. The pandemic hasn’t quite reached our shores but I feel a need to rise to the occasion, offer my services at the front line instead of faffing around as I have been, writing a book about being a doctor while doing little of it, and teaching others how to do it while wondering if I still have that sharpness in me, that quick pattern recognition, that diagnostic edge, that confidence that I know what I don’t know, drug doses at my fingertips, that glorious feeling that I can do all of this and simultaneously manage the unexpected, the macabre, the lost and the uncertain.

I had imagined myself as a pandemic doctor giving unction to the dying in virus-infested houses, but in reality I have spent the week doing telephone consultations at my kitchen table in my socks.

I want to be heroic, as doctors are meant to be, but actually I’m terrified at the idea of exposing myself to a lethal viral load while tending to those coughing and hoiking and drooling. Me, with no mask and no drugs. I have read the grueling stories of doctors in Italy and New York. But this is New Zealand and already some good keen bloke is in his shed making plastic face shields with his 3D printer and attaching these to small helmets and delivering them free to doctors around the country. I have one and I feel safer.

[Read more…]

In lockdown

2 Comments

Alan Roddick

On the afternoon of Lockdown Day 16, I woke up from my siesta feeling as though we were all in a kind of suspended animation, with brave grins on our faces. I went outside to trim the hedge, but realised after a few minutes that, inside my skull, something had been at work, and needed my attention. So I went back indoors, and in five minutes had written down the words for a poem (finding the title took me two days). I was glad to snare these words as they came to me, because poems often take me weeks to work out.

In theory, this period of Lockdown ought to be useful ‘free time’ to get done what we really want to do: to write that family memoir, or put together a photo album for the grandchildren – or maybe re-decorate the spare bedroom. But Lockdown can be filled with distractions (think of all those addictive news-bulletins!), and somehow the normal domestic tasks take longer to finish, every step seems to need careful thought, because we just find ourselves proceeding more cautiously – suddenly more aware of other people, and what our actions might mean to them if we do the wrong thing. (And of course, we can also lose the plot: I realised this morning that the birthday cards I wrote in a rush last night won’t be needed till this time next month!)

[Read more…]

Bletchley Park 2020: Breaking the viral code

1 Comment

Alex McLellan

What is the COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 virus? Compared to most threats we encounter, the virus is small and simple. It doesn’t have sex, possess limbs or gills, or fill its lungs with air on a hill top and shout “It’s great to be alive!”. So is the virus alive, or just an organic robot? We talk of ‘killing’ the virus by washing our hands or using disinfectants, which means most of us think of it as a living creature of some sort. Whether we classify it as the ‘living’ or the ‘undead’, it is still a parasite that steals into our cells and helps itself to our enzymes and cell materials to make thousands of near-perfect copies of itself that go on to infect other cells in our bodies.

For the last few months I have been obsessively reading each major scientific discovery about the new SARS-CoV-2 virus, and delving into its close relatives that caused earlier epidemics of ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ (SARS). During the COVID-19 pandemic it has been difficult to stay asleep, and I wake wondering how the virus does this and that … then grab my iPad to search for the answer. Surprisingly, this research provides me with a lot of comfort. The more I get to know the inner workings of this terrible machine, the better I’m able to break it down to its basic parts. The more I research, the more clearly I can see the virus in my mind’s eye, and the more clearly I can see possible targets for treatment interventions and routes to vaccines.

[Read more…]