Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

In the frame

1 March 2021 4 Comments

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.

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Covid cat

1 March 2021 7 Comments

Jill McIlraith

I was eight when I learnt two things: how to tie a reef knot and that I should never sing in public. The right-over-left-and-left-over-right knot sequence had a symmetrical simplicity that stuck with me and was the most useful thing Brownies taught me. Not singing in public was a lesson learnt when another girl and I were persuaded to sing Galway Bay for the end of the year Brownie concert, because “everyone had to do something.” The silence after the first few bars encouraged us, until we realised the audience was too appalled even to snigger. We ploughed on, determined not to stop even as the shuffling got louder. We got polite applause, but were not too young to realise it was less from appreciation of our singing than from gratitude that we were done. But despite the muted response, I felt dogged satisfaction that we had not given up. We had stood side by side supporting each other and had stuck it out to our final flat note.

Ten years later, when I was an exchange student in Arizona, the music teacher insisted I join the school’s a capella choir on the premise that all exchange students did so. I explained why I should be exempt, but he insisted on an audition. Three bars into Edelweiss, he stopped and muttered, “I see what you mean.” I remember telling him not to worry, there were lots of other things I could do and I would concentrate on those.

And 2020, like no other year, has shown us how to rely on our strengths and adaptability, standing side by side, undaunted, while fearsome eddies swirl around. Those of us who work in general practice are used to days not turning out as planned, but none of us foresaw that we’d be spending blustery afternoons wrapped in flapping PPE among the road cones of car park Covid clinics. We looked as alien as we felt in those first few weeks of the Covid response level 4 lockdown, caught in the spotlight and wondering if we were up to it. It seems quaint now to look at the practice’s 2020 diary with its days blocked out for leave and travel. Patients were similarly thrown off track, but often much more seriously, their plans evaporating with job losses, home schooling demands and the seeping anxiety that comes with planet-wide uncertainty.

How to cope with so much uncertainty and change? Could we keep everyone safe and care for our patients? Overnight, we had to change to a completely new way of practising: phone and video consultations, triaging patients into red and green streams, keeping up with who we were supposed to be swabbing that day and who didn’t qualify. How could we meet the expectations of patients, Ministry of Health, DHB, PHO and our families, while not going batty ourselves? And were we going to be financially and emotionally robust enough to still be there for patients by the end of 2020?

We needed to work together with the sort of resilience, togetherness and grace under pressure that I had glimpsed as a hopeless eight-year-old singer.

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To Medicine via Paradise

7 December 2020 4 Comments

Rae Varcoe

“I’m going to be a nurse” had always been my answer to that perennial childhood question. It seemed to satisfy the questioner and happily deflected any further enquiry. When I was sixteen, five sturdy school friends organised a week’s trip, to a hut on the edge of Diamond Lake in Paradise Valley, near Glenorchy. To get there involved a bus trip from Dunedin to Queenstown, the Earnslaw Steamer to Glenorchy, a hitched ride to Paradise, then a walk. All this involved money, and I didn’t have any.

I needed a job for the preceding two weeks, preferably with lots of overtime. Just such a job appeared at Seacliff Mental Hospital, so I swapped my gym frock for a rigidly starched pink uniform, crowned by a board-stiff white cap and ventured into the Admissions Ward.

At 7am each day the six duty nurses stood around the oak desk in Sister’s office and read THE REPORT. Among other helpful nursing tips it offered a assessment of the mental condition of New Admissions. These individuals were invariably described as “pleasant and cooperative” or “sullen and resentful.” Most of the nurses would also fit the latter category.

Dr Smith of Rawene

7 December 2020 16 Comments

Jocelyn Harris

Dr G. M. Smith: “a cross between an Arab Chieftan and an Archbishop.”

Soon after the war, my intrepid mother Margot Wood (later Ross) set off on the long, dusty journey from Dunedin, in the south of New Zealand’s South Island, to the Hokianga, in the far north of the North Island, in her little Ford Anglia car. My father, Captain Win Wood, had died in Egypt, and medical student Janet Smith, daughter of Dr. Smith of Rawene, was then our boarder. She would prove a life-long friend to Margot and a second mother to me. We were both run-down and thin, so Janet recommended a holiday with her parents, George and Lucy Smith. George was the well-known Rawene-based doctor George Marshall McCall Smith (1882–1958), described by the poet A. R. D. Fairburn as “a cross between an Arab Chieftain and an Archbishop.” To a small child, he seemed almost as awe-inspiring as Tāne Mahuta, for he was a tall man-tree with fierce, penetrating blue eyes, big hooked nose, white eldritch locks, open-necked white shirt, loose flannel jacket and trousers, flapping oilskin coat, old grey felt hat with a sagging brim, Roman sandals, and curved Cherrywood pipe. He and Lucy immediately set about stuffing us with fresh eggs, cream, and butter. Alas, I’ve never looked back.

I remember waka racing on the harbour, and Māori children, blinded in a measles outbreak, singing in a choir. Rooms opening off the verandah were filled with flowers; sofas were strewn with books and journals; paintings by Olivia Spencer-Bowers and Eric Lee-Smith hung on the walls. We began to heal.

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The Suitcases (Part Two)

7 December 2020 7 Comments

Lynn Jenner

This is Part Two of “The Suitcases.” Part One can be read here.

My mother’s name was Lesley Jenner. She brought me up to call her Lesley, because she said she was a person, not just a mother. From her late eighties Lesley had dementia. Not long before Lesley died, she drew a map and gave it to a caregiver. Lesley had put the words ‘Rest Home’ on the map, and somewhere above that and to the right, sitting all by itself in the sky, like Jerusalem on a mediaeval map, was the house where she grew up, neatly labelled ‘6 Highcliff Road.’ There was a loop to indicate the Ross’s Corner tram terminus and two sentences written in pencil. One said, ‘Can you help me find my mother?’ and the other said ‘My parents are not well off.’ The fact that Lesley had organised a pencil and paper, written this plea for help and given it to a staff member spoke of her desperation. The accuracy of the map was proof of the islands of memory and logic Lesley still had inside her.

When I visited her in the rest home, Lesley never wanted me to leave. She never said, “Don’t go.” She would just look at me like an animal in a trap, and I knew what she meant. When her tea-time approached, or when the sun was setting, or when I just couldn’t stand being there any longer, I would tell her I had to pick up my partner from the train and Lesley would nod, because a man needing his dinner trumps everything in the lives of women. Lesley would watch me as I walked out. In the car I would sanitise my hands and look at the sun setting over the sea. I would try to breathe normally, and I would drive to the railway station where I would sit in the car until my partner’s train arrived. Sometimes that was an hour.

The Suitcases

9 November 2020 6 Comments

Lynn Jenner

My mother’s name was Lesley Jenner. She brought me up to call her Lesley, because she said she was a person, not just a mother. Lesley was brought up in Dunedin in a Jewish family and was a quiet and polite person who never asked for much. She had green fingers and loved to be outside in nature. Her habit of mind was scientific. Lesley died in the autumn of 2019, a week before Pesach. Immediately afterwards, and for several months, I was occupied with the administration of her death. This followed a period of several years when I had been much occupied with Lesley’s life.

In 2013, Lesley left her own home and lived with me while we waited for an apartment in a retirement village. She had told me years before that leaving her house would be terrible for her, and it was. When we picked Lesley up from the airport and drove her to our place in our tiny little car, she was solid and heavy in the front seat. Her face was set in an expression of absolute misery and she was silent, as if her closed mouth was all that was holding back an endless outpouring of tears.

Once Lesley was unpacked, I started trying to get some routines going. I remember bright spring sunlight shining into the dining room, matching my optimism that we would create a new life now, as people who cared about each other. My partner and I would share our life with my mother and that would help to make up for some of the gaps that were visible in her memory and thinking. We had shared our house with people before so we thought we could make this work. My mother and I would talk over tricky matters like money or what each person needed, and we would solve problems together. After all, I was fifty-nine now.

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