Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Trust your instincts

15 October 2018 2 Comments

Jess Thompson

As a nutrition student, I have developed an immense appreciation for food and have become infinitely grateful for the role that nutrients play in keeping us alive and healthy. So I was very surprised when my younger sister fell ill with anorexia nervosa. She had watched a set of emotive health documentaries and had read numerous articles that slam key dietary components such as sugar, while promoting healthy eating and weight loss. This prompted her to follow a so-called “healthy diet” with the aim of losing weight. This shocked me because my sister already had a slim figure and had never been one to care about her health.

Weeks passed with her meal sizes decreasing, her exercise increasing, and her care for healthy food progressing from an interest to an obsession. She became consumed by health gurus on social media and took every false health claim to heart. Her healthy eating stint progressed to the point where she would refuse to eat any foods containing preservatives or oil, was suddenly a self-proclaimed “coeliac” and “vegan”, and was “lactose intolerant”. Eventually she was admitted to hospital with a weight of only 41 kilograms and an alarmingly slow heart rate of 29 beats per minute. She was at risk of heart failure, and we did not know if she would survive.

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The herb garden

15 October 2018 6 Comments

Beatrice Hale

As a nine and ten year old I spent six months in the local Children’s Hospital in Aberdeen. Rheumatic fever was one of the nasties at that time, and a number of the children in the ward were victims, all of us on bed rest, the treatment at that time. One method of self-amusement was reading. The Dimsie books, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, were among the one or two books a week that my favourite aunt brought in for me.

From Dimsie Goes to School to Dimsie Grows Up and Dimsie Carries On, Dimsie has remained a favourite with me for many years.

The most influential was Dimsie Grows Up. The morality of the tale strikes me afresh every time I look at the book. Dimsie could not fulfil her ambition to become a doctor; her father had died and left very little money. Sadly, reluctantly, but determined to be cheerful and not to moan (moral message here!), Dimsie decides to join her mother in the old family home in Perthshire. She begins to travel north from her school on the south coast of England, but a train strike intervenes. A fellow traveller hires a car and several passengers abandon the train journey and drive north with him. He just happens to be a doctor who eventually takes up a practice in Perthshire. No prizes for guessing one of the story’s themes.

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Unearthing the painful: from PhD to book

8 October 2018 Leave a Comment

Sandra Arnold

Many New Zealanders have first-hand experience of earthquakes and through television have seen the devastation caused by hurricanes, floods, typhoons and tsunamis. The stories that come out of these disasters are similar to the stories I read during my research into parental bereavement for my PhD thesis. First, in terms of reaction, there’s the initial paralysing shock and fear of the future, then there’s struggling to survive, and finally, for most people, there’s rebuilding. In grieving any kind of major disaster it can take a long time to determine how to make life work again in a world that has irrevocably changed.

For many people who experienced the earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011, and the thousands of aftershocks, part of that determining involved talking about what happened. Others felt it was too raw to talk about. Some who didn’t experience the quakes wanted to hear all the details. Others wished people would change the subject. Some tried to educate themselves on the causes and effects of earthquakes. Words outside our normal vocabulary peppered the stories we told each other.

Lessons of Life from World of Warcraft

8 October 2018 1 Comment

Katherine Hall

Much has been written about how the arts and humanities can contribute to our understanding of life, but little (if anything) about the positive effects of video games. Having been an avid player of World of Warcraft for ten years I would like to write about the lessons of how to live well that I have gained from spending my time in this activity (as of this moment: 224 days, 19 hours, 20 minutes, and 40 seconds on my main character or ‘main’).

World of Warcraft (WOW) was released in 2004. It has over a hundred million accounts but only a small number of these – about five million – represent active players. Still, this means an awful lot of people around the world are playing it.

Essentially, you construct a character which is either of the Alliance or Horde faction. This is a fundamental distinction, as there is only very limited communication possible between the two factions – waving hands, farting in their general direction or similar bodily movements. Almost all player-to-player interaction occurs within your faction, and especially within your Guild. A Guild is a group of players admitted by a designated player already in the Guild. Your Guild is your WOW family, the players you chat with and get to know best on a daily basis. [Read more…] about Lessons of Life from World of Warcraft

A Box of Bones (Part 2)

8 October 2018 4 Comments

Sue Wootton

This essay continues from Part 1, which you can read here.

At some point most evenings I would put down my pen and pull the box of bones towards me. The lid had a small brass hook which fastened to a matching brass eye on the base. I tapped the hook edgeways and, as it fell free of the eye, felt the box give, as if I’d unbuttoned a tight corset. Apart from the foot and the hand, whose bones had been wired together, the bones lay separated and higgledy-piggeldy. I might pick up whatever happened to be lying on the top, a rib perhaps, or the femur. At other times I needed to look more closely at a specific part of the body, and so I would fish around for that particular bone.

The knocking sound of bone on bone and bone on box comes back to me as I recall this. With practice I became good at fishing blind, my eyes on Gray’s Anatomy and one hand in the box, delving. The scapula is like a large empty scallop shell. The humerus and the fibula are long sticks. The humerus is thicker, and knobbled top and bottom. The fibula is more like a giant’s toothpick or knitting needle. A patella sits comfortably in the palm of the hand, and has a satisfying contoured shape, like a large limpet. I noticed, too, the patella’s heft, its stone-like solidity. Most of the rest of the bones in the box didn’t feel this way. They were very light in the hand, almost like holding sticks of chalk. Had they been buried, or cremated, of course, they would be less than chalk by now. They’d be dust. Perhaps beyond dust: loam, clay. Shakespeare has Hamlet imagine Alexander’s bones fully recycled in the earth, becoming clay to stop a bunghole. To what base uses we may return, Horatio.

Books as friends … and medicine

1 October 2018 3 Comments

Grace Carlyle

When I was a child I discovered three authors who have voyaged with me through life. What a debt of gratitude I owe these women who have strengthened, enriched, educated, supported and amused me for so long. I have since found other authors, some considered ‘worthier’, and deeply enjoyed them, but in difficult times I return to my old friends of childhood and reread them with undiminished delight. I don’t believe that the secret of the power is merely nostalgia. It’s something much simpler: they work. I take them like medicine. In fact I prefer them to any medicine I have ever experienced.

Where to begin? At an impressionable age I discovered Georgette Heyer and fell in love with her wit, her style, the historic settings, the sheer romanticism of her novels. Which was maybe a bit unfortunate as it took a little time to learn that the men I were reading about weren’t likely to walk into my life. What a sad day it was when I realised that. It required extensive rereading to cheer myself up, by which time the old familiar spell was working upon me all over again, albeit somewhat more realistically. But Heyer’s humour never failed to give me a lift when the going became heavy. While my reasons for returning to her kept changing, the effect remained consistent. I felt better for the reading. [Read more…] about Books as friends … and medicine