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.
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.
