In the frame

Trish Harris

Last month I visited the hospital. Even when the reasons are straightforward, the experience is never without echoes.

Frame #1:

I am sitting in the café in Wellington Hospital’s atrium. From my table I can see an inner courtyard of tables and chairs and a sculpture of arches and lintel. The sculpture is actually a section of the old hospital entranceway, a familiar sight from when I was admitted as a child. But I am not a child. In this frame I am a poet, the writer of My Wide White Bed, a book of poems about being in hospital. Today I am here to talk to a staff member about the possibility of framing some of them for display in hospital corridors. Poems that will ring a little bell for today’s inpatients: We have a voice; you are seen. That’s what they’ll trill. Well, that’s the hope.

Frame #2:

After the café meeting, I head to my orthopaedic outpatient’s appointment. In this frame I am a patient. I answer the prioritisation form, trying to make my life fit onto a sliding scale. All I want is a referral to Orthotics, who have made my shoes for the past twenty-five years.

The registrar comes in, offers a smile and handshake. He examines my hands, says good tendons, fingers not crooked. Surgeries? Hips, four, I say, two revisions. He moves to my feet. Flat feet, he says, stiff. What about pain? Difficult to get around?  I’ve adapted, I say, it’s different for someone whose life has been upended recently or for whom it keeps changing. I’ve had this for fifty-two years. I know how to do it.

Afterwards I think, why did I go on about coping? A friend says, he was looking at you through one frame and you were trying to get him to look through another.

This is how I imagine it now: He comes into the cubicle and is holding an empty wooden picture frame. He has already used the frame to look at my prioritisation score. As he talks and examines he moves the frame – to my face, to my hands, to my feet, back to my face. I do not like the frame. When I say I’ve adapted, I’m trying to wrench the frame sideways. I am trying to say, I am over here … I’m creative, I live life, you’re looking in the wrong place.

But he is a busy doctor in a busy hospital system and the frames are calibrated for dis-function and disruption and prioritising medical intervention. I do not want to be seen through those frames, but I need him to sign the piece of paper that will ensure I have wearable shoes for the next five years. As I leave, he puts the frame aside and we shake hands. I’ve signed the form, he says, now it goes to the Orthotic Gatekeeper.

Frame #3:

I leave the clinic. I am in my power chair and I rocket down the corridors flinging off frames that have landed on me like hoops in the game of quoits. You are just a body. Run that one over. A body in deficit. Squash that one. It’s impossible to get rid of them all.

Instead of going home I’m heading to the Wellington Campus of the Otago Medical School, attached to the hospital. I’m re-visiting an art print by leading Māori artist, Robyn Kahukiwa.  It depicts a wāhine, her head tilted, her moko kauwae clear, and above her a red admiral butterfly or kahukura.

The print, and the story that is displayed alongside it, both move me deeply. The story tells of a boy who became very ill, very suddenly. It’s the story of the parents’ fear, and of the young doctor who cared, at the end of his long shift putting on his ‘ordinary person’ clothes and driving the family home. It’s about the doctor’s mother who said “that’s not amazing, that’s the sort of thing people should do.” It’s about the gratitude of the boy and his family, right up to his grandmother, Robyn Kahukiwa, and the gifting of her print to the doctor.

Usually in hospital, stories are fragmented. Usually we are fragmented. But looking at this print and reading this story, makes me feel less fragmented.

When all the elements are in the frame – the voices of patients, family, doctors – and all the emotions of a hospital visit are recognised and respected – fear, tiredness, anger, gratitude, connectedness – healing happens in a way that is all too rare.

But for me, Robyn Kahukiwa’s magnificent print moves the story to a deeper place again. It speaks of transformation. Words have been spoken and words have been received – and that leads to a new creation, the kahukura. Who wouldn’t want to be in that frame?

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Trish Harris works part-time as writing tutor. Her memoir, The Walking Stick Tree, includes narrative, personal essays and illustrations. Her debut poetry collection, My Wide White Bed, captures the life of an orthopaedic ward from the point of view of a patient. Hear Harry Ricketts review My Wide White Bed on Radio New Zealand National here.

Read more by Trish Harris on Corpus: Going public with very personal stories

See also on Corpus: a review of My Wide White Bed by Lynn Jenner, and Crip the Lit: Here we are, read us