Review - Corpus

About living with cancer … “I’d Rather Be a Fairy Princess” by Petra Kotrotsos

7 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

When Petra Kotrotsos was six years old and playing in a park with friends, she fell off a roundabout, landing on her back. The pain didn’t settle, and Petra was taken to the doctor. An x-ray revealed a large tumour (a neuroblastoma) in her chest.

Now 20, Kotrotsos has written a book for children who find themselves faced with the same kind of challenge. I’d Rather Be a Fairy Princess begins with a statement of courage and fortitude:

My name is Petra and I am seven years old. I’ve always wanted to be a fairy princess, but when cancer attacks, you have to fight it. You have to be a warrior.”

A review of Havi Carel’s ‘Phenomenology of Illness’.

7 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Katherine Hall

Vita Non Est Vivere, Sed Valere Vita Est: life is not just being alive, but being well — Martial.

How appropriate Martial’s words are for Phenomenology of Illness by Havi Carel, which explores the concepts of illness and a life well lived. Although overtly a call to arms for philosophers to take more seriously the experience of illness and what this means to be human and for humans, the superb clarity of language makes this an accessible book for anyone interested in this field. It is a text which can speak poignantly to patients, those who care for them, and anybody with an interest in the philosophy of medicine.

It is to the teachers of student doctors, nurses and other future healthcare workers that I particularly address this review. Havi Carel’s book lays bare the injuries endured by patients due to the limitations of the biomedical model of discourse – but thankfully illustrates many possible ways forward.

‘Listening with my heart’: Poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses

24 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Miriam Vollweiler

By their involvement in the arts, whether poetry, painting, or writing novels, nurses and other health professionals have the opportunity to express a side of themselves which is not always possible in their day-to-day work. It is a creative way of reflecting and thinking about what they see and do and feel in their daily contact with patients.” – Lorraine Ritchie, editor of Listening with my Heart

The recently-launched book, Listening with my heart: Poems by Aotearoa New Zealand nurses, is the first anthology of poems by nurses to be published in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Edited by nurse and poet Lorraine Ritchie, with illustrations by Janet de Wagt, it contains poems selected from work submitted by nurses as part of a New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s ‘Visibility of Nursing’ project.

‘Alzheimer’s and a Spoon’: the nourishment of memory

10 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

How can we use language to talk about not having language?”

This question held poet Liz Breslin in its grip for the several years it took to write the poems that appear in her first – terrific – collection. The book’s title, Alzheimer’s and a Spoon, encompasses the themes woven through the poems. On the one hand there is a beloved grandmother’s illness, and her gradual loss of memory and language through Alzheimer’s disease. On (or in) the other hand, there is a spoon, and all the nourishment implied by spoons and spooning: physical, emotional and spiritual.

Breslin’s collection probes the bonds between memory, language and identity. It explores a resonating question: What happens to the present and the future if we forget the past?

‘Doctors in Denial’: an account of two cancers, one physical and the other moral’

22 May 2017 2 Comments

Dr Tree Cocks

Doctors in Denial by Ron Jones is a meticulously researched and perceptive account of the “unfortunate experiment” entailing non-treatment of cervical carcinoma in situ that occasioned The Cartwright Inquiry. It is an account of two cancers really, one physical and the other moral.

Jones has gathered together an enormous amount of detailed information from the 1920s to the present day. Because his research has tapped many sources and because he is interested in human dynamics, the chronology sometimes takes a complex route. I found it a multifaceted detective story, to uncover the why and how of the tragedy.

Like playing the piano blindfold: “Life on the Spectrum”

1 May 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Musician and teacher Julie Hanify has played the piano since she was a child, but for most of her life she felt like she was “playing blindfold”. In her memoir Small Blue Thing: Life on the Spectrum, Julie writes:

I had the sense that each note was in its own world and that the next note was a total surprise, as if it were on the following page. Reading music was like leaping note to note over an abyss. I lived my life like this. I’d be in the moment with no forward thought or planning for the next.”

When she was 43, Hanify was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The prescribed medication improved her brain’s capacity to filter and sort multiple stimuli. Now, for the first time ever, she could sight-read music. More generally, she was able to sense the present moment as having been shaped by the past and as contributing to the future. With a sense of sequence as a frame for life’s experiences, Hanify could grasp previously elusive concepts like anticipation, planning, and cause and effect. “Medication”, she writes, “changed my life”.