Review – Page 3

“There’s no science for goodbye”

24 September 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Aspiring Daybook by Annabel Wilson describes a year in the life of a young New Zealander, Elsie Winslow, whose carefree travels in Europe are interrupted by a phone call:

A phone call in the middle of the night. Not a good sign.
Out of context, the wrong time, too early or too late.
Malevolent omen. So often the sound of bad news.

And it is bad news. Elsie’s brother has cancer. She boards a long haul flight, heading home to help look after him. Time, place, light – all these reliable fundamentals seem to be falling apart. “I’m on a plane, going forward in time, back into the past … Today is New Year’s Day, and it’s getting erased.” Elsie’s journal becomes a kind of touchstone, or navigation tool, for piecing together a new reality on the other side of this catastrophic news. [Read more…] about “There’s no science for goodbye”

“Bad Blood”

6 August 2018 1 Comment

Cushla McKinney

In 2014-15, one of the most highly fêted names in biomedical circles was Elizabeth Holmes. 31 year-old Holmes had founded a company called Theranos, to manufacture a small, easy-to-use device – the Edison– that was capable of running multiple analyses on a single drop of blood. Although the Edison was not yet commercially available, the company was testing blood samples from Palo Alto patients on their in-house machines, and had signed agreements with the Cleveland Clinic, Capital BlueCross and AmeriHealth Caritas.

Holmes predicted that Thaneros technology would slash the cost of blood tests, spare patients the stress and pain of repeated blood draws and allow everyday people to monitor their own health on a daily basis, just as a diabetic checks their blood sugar levels. What investors and consumers did not know, however, was that beneath its elegant housing the Edison consisted of little more than a pipette robotic arm, only able to carry out one of the three types of tests Theranos offered, and that with very poor reproducibility. Other tests were carried out on standard equipment but on such dilute samples that their results were also unreliable, and doctors using the company’s services were frequently having to reorder tests from other providers.

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“The Language of Kindness”: on being a nurse

30 July 2018 2 Comments

Cushla McKinney

After twenty years as a nurse in the British National Health Service (NHS), Christie Watson is leaving medicine to pursue a literary career. But with the generosity that characterises the job to which she has devoted much of her life, she has taken the time to share what it has taught her.

In The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story of Life, Death and Hope, which falls somewhere between memoir and manifesto, she offers readers insights into an essential but undervalued profession and provides a blunt assessment of the way in which decades of political decision-making have compromised the heath system in general, and nursing in particular.

A little book with big feathers: “Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t”

16 July 2018 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul – ” Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I was browsing in the bookshop, and a book flew into my hands. It was called Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t.

A “world gone to sh*t” – that seems a fair diagnosis of the current age. And who can say they’re not to some degree infected by the hopelessness this tends to engender? It’s a widespread general malaise. But here in the bookshop this bold wee book fluttered in my palms. I opened it, and read the epigraph by Oscar Wilde:

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

It was my first inkling of why Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t had flown so urgently out of the shelves. It’s that fully-feathered thing, a book of hope. It deserves a perch in every human soul.

Song for Rosaleen: “the heartbreak that is dementia”

25 June 2018 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

A memoir, by definition, is composed of memories. It is almost unbearably poignant, then, that Song for Rosaleen is a memoir that exists only because of memory loss. Written by Wellington oral historian and editor Pip Desmond, it documents her mother’s slide into vascular dementia and the effects of this on the entire family.

Perhaps this sounds grim – and of course in many ways it is. But Song for Rosaleen is gripping. It is at one level a personal account, at another a meditation on memory itself, and at yet another an erudite critique of how our society treats the frail, dependent and voiceless. For this latter reason alone it should be essential reading for everyone who works in health: management, non-clinical and clinical staff alike.

The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey

28 May 2018 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

There is no health without mental health.” – Jim Lucey (Irish Times interview, 2017)

Dr Jim Lucey is an Irish psychiatrist who has spent over three decades working in his chosen field of healthcare. In his 2014 book, In My Room: the Recovery Journey as Encountered by a Psychiatrist, Lucey outlines some of what he has learned during this time. He calls the book, which is framed as a collection of anonymised case studies, “an authentic description of the journey from distress to recovery as I have witnessed it”.

The room of the title is both the actual room of the clinic and the metaphorical ‘room’ of the mind. We all visit the former from time to time, but we must be able to live permanently in, or with, the latter. Lucey is compassionately interested in the various ways his patients learn to manage that challenge. He has much to share about the nature of recovery and of keeping well. [Read more…] about The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey