Memoir - Corpus

A lesson from Africa

18 September 2017 4 Comments

Mary Morwood

It always seems impossible until it is done.” – Nelson Mandela.

“Me, judgmental? Of course not! … that’s how I saw myself until I met Meniswa. I was in Africa, six months into my 2 year physiotherapy assignment with NZ Volunteer Services Abroad.

“Come with me, Mary” said the tireless Xhosa social worker. “I want you on this home visit”. We endured the usual bumpy ride on the potholed Transkei road, and then walked across the fields to reach a house. It looked reasonably comfortable, by Transkei standards. So far so good.

There was no response to our knocks and calls. We wandered around the back of the house, past goats and chickens. We found our client, a 16 year old with severe athetoid cerebral palsy. She was slithering around on a grass mat filthy with flies, chicken droppings and blood from her period. A dilapidated wheelchair was parked nearby. The cheerful chickens were her only company.

[Read more…] about A lesson from Africa

Metaphor and mental illness

18 September 2017 1 Comment

Heather Bauchop

I was meaning to write something about darkness and the health implications of street lights, but I’ve been swept away by Jay Griffiths’ 2016 memoir Tristimania: a diary of manic depression . Having previously read Griffiths’ Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, I had meant to track down more of her writing, but had forgotten. It was a joyous surprise to find Tristimania on the Dunedin Public Library’s Book Bus.

An award-winning non-fiction writer, Griffiths recounts a harrowing year of illness with a prolonged episode of mixed-state hypomania (for which Griffiths prefers to use ‘manic depression’ or the older term ‘tristimania’).

First born: June 1959. Radcliffe, Manchester.

4 September 2017 2 Comments

Wendy Fearnley

My labour started at 8am but we waited eleven hours before going to the large Edwardian house that had been converted to a maternity hospital. Brian, my husband, dropped me off and I was taken to a room with four beds, three of which were already occupied. I was instructed to get undressed and into bed. Nobody in the room spoke and then I realised that the woman next to me was not sleeping but sobbing quietly. She pulled the covers over her head.

The woman opposite mouthed, ‘Her baby was stillborn.’

“Them rags that wells my legs”: Sister Kenny’s first polio case

31 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952) is famous for inventing and teaching ‘the Kenny Method’ for polio treatment. Her method advocated the application of hot packs during the acute phase of the illness, followed in the convalescent phase by passive movements and active muscle rehabilitation. The Kenny Method contradicted orthodox medical thinking of the time, which was to splint and immobilise the patient, sometimes for many months. Kenny’s approach was used with reported success in Australian clinics during the 1930s, and despite ongoing controversy and opposition from some medical quarters, was eventually adopted in the USA from 1940.

In her autobiography, And They Shall Walk, Sister Kenny tells the story of her first encounter with polio, and how she stumbled on the idea of using moist heat for relief of pain and spasm. Aged 23, and working as a ‘bush nurse’, she was called to a remote outback cottage, where six months previously she had helped with a birth. According to Kenny’s account, this is what happened:

“During my brief stay at the cottage six months before I had grown to love the little two-year-old sister of the new baby boy, and as I rode into the yard I expected to see her come running out to meet me. But all was quiet. The setting sun shed its soft light on the autumn flowers that surrounded even the least pretentious of Australian homes – great masses of bronze and white and pink chrysanthemums and dahlias. But the silence disturbed me. The shy youngsters usually swarm out to greet the bush nurse, and I was full of fears when the frantic mother, only a year older than I, opened the door to me.

Through the fog: book by book, word by word

17 July 2017 2 Comments

Grace Carlyle

DECEPTION OF TIREDNESS

buried under a wait of exhaustion
there is no fragrance in my words
fold the flowers away,
the sun shines
why do I hear rain?

Illness has been a common thread throughout my life, that of those close to me or my own. It set me on a course that would ultimately prove against me, yet I determined to grow up strong, healthy and financially independent – if it killed me.

Choosing Paediatrics as a Career in Medicine

26 June 2017 Leave a Comment

John Clarkson

My early developmental experience included growing up on a farm in the Waikato. Although I enjoyed helping to care for the calves, lambs, piglets, chickens, puppies, and kittens, I never wanted to become a farmer. Animal handling practices at the time were not always baby-friendly, and some were cruel. It is reassuring that the practice has improved to some extent.

Instead of farming I was able to follow my older brother’s footsteps to New Zealand’s then only medical school at Otago. Despite the distance and the hazards of hitchhiking as the main form of travel, it was usual to return to the home farm during term holidays. Here I was able to be involved with the observations made by my paediatrician brother-in-law, Ross Howie, on the respiratory distress syndrome experienced by pre-term lambs in the makeshift “intensive care unit” in our woolshed. Along with Obstetrician Mont Liggins, also from Auckland, who discovered the maturing effect of maternally-given antenatal steroids on fetal lamb lungs, he went on to conduct the first randomised control trial of this intervention in humans. This practice which is now standard worldwide has saved many thousands of lives. While I was a medical student it was inspiring to be on the periphery of this ground-breaking research.