General - Corpus

Life with kidney disease and dialysis

17 September 2026 Leave a Comment

Paul Trotman

How are you?

Are you OK?

How are you feeling?

When I was in my late teens I developed a real dislike for these phrases and I’ve had a love hate relationship with them ever since. I was quite a sickly teenager. On the first day of my last year of high school I was dragged screaming and kicking to the GP after a couple of mysterious vomiting episodes – the last straw being when I threw up at the dinner table. No warning, no nausea just bleeeuch: succulent flakes of baked fish all over the place.

The GP took one look and said ‘Aha, kidney failure’. Apparently, I was a classic case. I wondered how malfunctioning kidneys could make me throw up, as my basic knowledge of biology told me the kidneys and the gut weren’t connected. He explained that if the kidneys aren’t working, toxins build up in the body, which makes you vomit. I was sent for urgent blood tests. In the lift to the blood lab my dad told me the initials on the form – ESRF – stood for End Stage Renal Failure. Uh-oh. [Read more…] about Life with kidney disease and dialysis

An invitation into a patient’s garden

1 September 2024 1 Comment

Lucy O’Hagan

Early in his memoir Native Son: The writer’s memoir, Witi Ihimaera introduced me to the idea that stories have a whakapapa. I had an image of a story travelling through generations of tellers and listeners, told in different places: a dinner table, a classroom, a wharenui, a road trip or perhaps as a whisper in a bed. And I imagine each teller and listener moulds that story into something that makes sense to them in their time and place.

I was recently told a metaphorical sort of story by my friend, the thoughtful and passionate GP, Nigel Thompson. It was a story that had been told to him by Richard Bolstad, who had been given the story by psychotherapist George Sweet. I don’t know Richard Bolstad at all, but if he is someone who passed a story from George to Nigel, I feel I would like him a lot.

We’re back …

30 August 2024 7 Comments

Sue Wootton

After three and a half years in hibernation, Corpus is back. We will soon be publishing some fresh posts. The site has remained online since we went into hiatus in March 2021 and still attracts several hundred visitors each month reading the back-posts.

We are now under the banner of Otago University Press. With the assistance of University of Otago Humanities Internship programme, we are looking forward to publishing new pieces on a semi-regular basis.

Whether you are a subscriber or a casual reader, we hope you will enjoy the new material as well as our archive, and recommend the site to others.

Stay tuned!

Corpus secures sponsor

1 April 2019 3 Comments

Dr Colin Oscar Peez

Corpus is pleased to announce that we have secured a sponsor. The Danish company VævPoop has committed to sponsor our site for 2019. At a time when there are a plethora of questionable new remedies and health fads on the market, we were wary at first of the claims made in relation to their product.

Putting our feet up for a while …

17 December 2018 6 Comments

Sue Wootton

Corpus has had another great year, publishing 127 posts on a wide variety of health-related topics by a wide variety of writers. Recently we also passed 100,000 reads of articles on the site since we launched Corpus in May 2016. The total number of articles we’ve published so far is over 350.

put your feet up Corpus is now taking a lengthy break over summer. Posts on the site will resume on an intermittent basis from March 2019. Due to other commitments and a lack of funding, we will be unable to keep up the pace of publishing three articles a week.

The website will stay online indefinitely so you can dip back into articles you enjoyed or haven’t read yet. Just use the search and category boxes to find something of interest.

Many thanks again to all those who have contributed such thoughtful pieces over the past three years. We can’t sign off without a special thank you to our unsung hero Doug Lilly who has managed the design and technical side of the site since its inception (even though it made him intolerably grumpy at times as he fought off the spammers and hackers).

Here’s a small selection of 2018’s most popular posts to dip back into:

Time to put our feet up

18 December 2017 9 Comments

Sue Wootton & Barbara Brookes

Corpus has had a great second year, publishing 138 posts on a wide variety of health-related topics by a wide variety of writers.

Corpus is taking a replenishing break over Christmas and New Year. While we’re away, dip into the Corpus archives for some great reading. Here’s a small selection of this year’s most popular posts to start you off: