Memoir - Corpus

Three years ago, in the grip of a sudden, near fatal cardiac ‘event’, I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, only to be taken to a larger hospital system by helicopter. At the time it seemed likely I would need urgent cardiac surgery. As it turned out, I was treated medically, eventually learning, but only after some months had passed, that what had occurred was most likely a viral inflammation of the tissue surrounding my heart: pericarditis.

Within the space of a few hours I was jolted from being a healthy active seventy year old (admittedly a bit tired after shifting house), into an old person, on heart medication for life, who needed to ‘take care of himself’.

On rabies

13 March 2017 1 Comment

Dr Anna Holmes

I first encountered rabies in Trincomalee, Ceylon, in 1947. The father of one of my friends at school died suddenly. I remember sitting quietly while the adults talked in hushed voices about “hydrophobia” and how “their throats close up when they want to drink”. The other thing they said was “The treatment is ten days of injections into the tummy”. I felt sad for my friend and her family, and anxious at the thought of ten injections – I loathed being stuck with needles. I was also upset that the puppy, which our mother had found for us, was sent away. In those days there was no immunisation for dogs.

Later, at medical school in Edinburgh, we were told about rabies and what a scourge it was in many parts of the world. The treatment was serial injections with immunoglobulin as soon as possible after infection.

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Unbelonging

6 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Majella Cullinane

In her early twenties, Majella Cullinane set out to explore Africa, the continent she had longed to visit since reading Out of Africa as a teenager in her homeland, Ireland. But in Mozambique, Cullinane suddenly found herself in the grips of a culture shock so severe that it threatened to overwhelm all her previous notions of personal identity. Now a writer herself, Cullinane reflects on the visceral terror of that experience:

Unbelonging

You lie awake in a small room. Lightning illuminates the dressing table, the chair, the curtains. Thunder bruises the night sky with a fist of rage. The rain comes down hard, like a deluge of nails on a corrugated iron roof. It is this sound that takes you back. Up and away to a ninth floor apartment, to another continent. A levitating memory. Where you find yourself in another room, this one marble floored with a high ceiling.

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Ways of Seeing?

6 February 2017 2 Comments

Bruce Summers

My father-in-law, Eric Leary, was totally blind from the age of eight. During an impromptu children’s game of cricket on waste ground, somewhere in the East End of London, he was struck in the eye by a potato. This was in the 1920s: the bat was a plank of wood, the stumps a cardboard box, and the pitch just the distance from ‘ball’ to ‘bat’. The ball, of course, was the potato that changed his life forever. He was treated at Moorfields Eye Hospital but developed ‘complementary’ blindness in the other eye a few days later and subsequently had both eyes enucleated. Eric’s reaction to total blindness, as a child, was simple acceptance but later, as an adolescent and adult, he came to consider his accident as good fortune and an asset.

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Scarlet Fever, 1941: a memoir

6 February 2017 1 Comment

Wendy Fearnley

In 1941, at the age of five, Wendy Fearnley caught scarlet fever and spent seven weeks in isolation at the Monsall Fever Hospital, Manchester, UK. She explains what that was like:

It was 1941, and I was five years old and living in Manchester when I contracted Scarlet Fever. My memory begins in a side ward, with a doctor giving me an injection and me whining, ‘that’s 13 injections. I don’t want any more.’ He replied, ‘Not many more.’ This was before penicillin was available and I think I was treated with sulphur.

On becoming illiterate

5 December 2016 2 Comments

Dr Lynley Hood

In 2009, author Lynley Hood was diagnosed with a rare eye disorder. In this video, the audio of which is transcribed below, she describes the devastation of ‘becoming illiterate’.

For every person who’s got a white cane or a guide dog there are ten people who are struggling to read, and they’re very frightened about what the future holds. I was reading in bed one evening and my left eye went blurry. I thought, time to put the light out. And in the morning it was still blurry…

The heart of the matter

13 March 2017 Leave a Comment