conversations about medicine and life

Composing ourselves

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Sue Wootton

New Zealanders are reeling after the atrocious events in Christchurch on 15 March 2019. We grieve for those who died, for those who have lost loved ones, for the injured. We think of the many people facing long recoveries from life-changing physical and emotional wounds.

If there is one thing about this terrible time from which I, and others, have drawn hope, it’s been the overwhelming response of connection, compassion and support. There has been a powerful communal instinct towards repair and healing. One manifestion of this is the urge to make. It’s in the service of this urge that so many of us have gathered flowers and arranged them in bouquets, sung together, walked together in silent vigil. Others have cooked meals, baked bread, provided transport or translated words. I happened to visit a wool store yesterday, and was invited to join in on a project that has sprung up to knit socks and face cloths for women from the local Muslim community. “We want,” said the shop owner, “to show that we care about our fellow citizens from top to toe.”

All over the country there are many more examples of people who have picked up tools and instruments to do their bit to create harmony and cohesion: brush stroke by brush stroke, stitch by stitch, note by note, word by word.

Al Huda Mosque, Dunedin

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“Poetry and Mindfulness”

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Sue Wootton

Poetry and Mindfulness

Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments – and perhaps even to empathize with each other.”  – Bryan Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness.
We citizens of the so-called developed world are living through a rapidly changing, fast-paced and information-dense time. We can trace the effects of this in our daily language. In a relatively short length of time, the digital age has appropriated certain key words, turning once qualitative terms into quantitative ones, and stretching the former meaning of words like ‘connection’ and ‘friend’ almost to breaking point. (I think also of terms once the province of human anatomy and communication, like ‘digital’, ‘fingerprint’, ‘face recognition’ and ‘voice technology’; and the emotional words ‘like’ and ‘love’.) Ostensibly we are the most connected and informed generations ever, yet loneliness, stress, cynicism, anxiety and depression seem endemic.

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A Box of Bones (Part 2)

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Sue Wootton

femurThis essay continues from Part 1, which you can read here.

At some point most evenings I would put down my pen and pull the box of bones towards me. The lid had a small brass hook which fastened to a matching brass eye on the base. I tapped the hook edgeways and, as it fell free of the eye, felt the box give, as if I’d unbuttoned a tight corset. Apart from the foot and the hand, whose bones had been wired together, the bones lay separated and higgledy-piggeldy. I might pick up whatever happened to be lying on the top, a rib perhaps, or the femur. At other times I needed to look more closely at a specific part of the body, and so I would fish around for that particular bone.

The knocking sound of bone on bone and bone on box comes back to me as I recall this. With practice I became good at fishing blind, my eyes on Gray’s Anatomy and one hand in the box, delving. The scapula is like a large empty scallop shell. The humerus and the fibula are long sticks. The humerus is thicker, and knobbled top and bottom. The fibula is more like a giant’s toothpick or knitting needle. A patella sits comfortably in the palm of the hand, and has a satisfying contoured shape, like a large limpet. I noticed, too, the patella’s heft, its stone-like solidity. Most of the rest of the bones in the box didn’t feel this way. They were very light in the hand, almost like holding sticks of chalk. Had they been buried, or cremated, of course, they would be less than chalk by now. They’d be dust. Perhaps beyond dust: loam, clay. Shakespeare has Hamlet imagine Alexander’s bones fully recycled in the earth, becoming clay to stop a bunghole. To what base uses we may return, Horatio.

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A Box of Bones (part 1)

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Sue Wootton

How Tom Beat Captain NajorkSearching recently for a good read-aloud children’s story, I pulled from the bottom of the bookshelf  How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. Young Tom lives with his aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She’s no soft-hearted dearest Auntie Fidge. She is aways, strictly, Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, a woman who “wore an iron hat, and took no nonsense from anyone.” In Quentin Blake’s illustrations she’s a big-beamed human battleship wearing a rivetted-on grey dress and a high grey helmet. Tom – colourful, cheeky, cheerful – is clearly dancing circles around her. Readers naturally side with Tom. He’s all risk and movement. He’s teetering and testing, nimble, flexible, curious and persistent. He’s full of life. Poor old Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong makes flowers droop and trees shiver. Ridiculous in her rigid posture, bound tight by her unbending rules, she represents a fatal stillness of the soul, a kind of living death.

When I was eighteen, I found myself in the presence of a someone very like Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She taught anatomy at the school of physiotherapy where I was enrolled as a first year student. Wide-hipped and waistless, with an imposing ledge of a bosom, whenever she walked into the room we tender blossoms drooped. She stomped, each footstep an insult to the floor. I would eventually learn to figure out where a person was hurting by watching them walk: low back, tummy, ribcage, shoulder, neck, head, hip, knee, archilles tendon – the site of pain always lends a signature adjustment to the gait. But even as-yet untrained, I could tell that Ms Anatomy Wonkham-Strong was through-and-through sore. Some long-ago irritation had lodged within her, had spread through her entire body, and vibrated out into any environment through which she moved.

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We are not alone: poetry in medicine

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Isabelle Lomax-Sawyers

The Empathy Exams

The day I flew to Dunedin to begin my first year studies in the health sciences, my wonderful best friend came to Wellington airport to see me off and gave me an article he’d been nagging me to read for ages. It was  Leslie Jamison’s essay The Empathy Exams. In it, Jamison explores the complexities of giving and receiving empathy through stories of her experiences as a medical actor playing a standardised patient, and as a patient herself. It turns out my best friend was right, of course; I read the whole essay twice through on the plane, and so began my love affair with medical creative writing.

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