Corpus

conversations about medicine and life

conversations about medicine and life

We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.

Being Asymmetrical

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Katie Brockie

Looking at myself in the mirror who is it,
Who is that lopsided stranger
Washing up and down the shore

Patricia Goedicke, from ‘Now Only One of Us Remains’

In 2023, I had a mastectomy. When I left the hospital, I was given a Dacron-stuffed soft fabric oval pad to use as a temporary prothesis for when I was able to wear bras again. It reminded me of the rolled-up pairs of socks that some girls used to stuff in their bras at high school – and of the other girls talking disparagingly about ‘falsies’. It was a few days until I was brave enough to look at myself in the mirror. When I did, it was an extraordinary feeling. A strip of surgical tape lay across the left side of my chest, which was now … empty. When I looked down, I could see my stomach sticking out. As many women also experience, it was hard enough to love my own body before I had surgery, but now I was wondering if I could love my asymmetrical body. Is it okay to love a scarred, one-breasted body, or should I book myself onto the waiting list for reconstructive surgery, ASAP?
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An invitation into a patient’s garden

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Lucy O’Hagan

Early in his memoir Native Son: The writer’s memoir, Witi Ihimaera introduced me to the idea that stories have a whakapapa. I had an image of a story travelling through generations of tellers and listeners, told in different places: a dinner table, a classroom, a wharenui, a road trip or perhaps as a whisper in a bed. And I imagine each teller and listener moulds that story into something that makes sense to them in their time and place.

I was recently told a metaphorical sort of story by my friend, the thoughtful and passionate GP, Nigel Thompson. It was a story that had been told to him by Richard Bolstad, who had been given the story by psychotherapist George Sweet. I don’t know Richard Bolstad at all, but if he is someone who passed a story from George to Nigel, I feel I would like him a lot.

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The Wellness Gym

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Laurence Fearnley

When you have treatment for cancer, information sometimes comes to you in a sideways fashion and not from the direction you expect. It didn’t seem weird, then, that it was from a newspaper article that I first learnt about the benefits of physical exercise during and after cancer treatment. The article detailed the closure of Expinkt, a gym and exercise programme that had been established by Associate Professor Lynnette Jones, a researcher in the field of Exercise Oncology. Expinkt was run by the University of Otago School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences from 2009 until November 2021 (when  funding dried up). During that time, the article said, the programme had treated hundreds of people with cancer, mostly breast cancer survivors. Now it was going to re-establish itself as The Wellness Gym, a not-for-profit in new facilities outside the university.

I was fortunate to be accepted into The Wellness Gym programme in July 2022, fourteen months after successful surgery to remove a large sarcoma from my thigh. In the period following surgery I had basically redefined myself as ‘disabled’. Along with my tumour, my hamstrings had been removed, and my mobility and flexibility had suffered enormously. I had gone from walking 60-90 minutes a day on Dunedin’s Signal Hill tracks to shuffling along, unable to raise my knee or lift my foot more than a few inches from the ground. I was unable to perform the simplest tasks: crouching to pick objects off the ground, negotiating uneven ground and steps. Many things I wanted to do – like getting on a bike, or straddling barriers such as stiles – were impossible. I could not reach below my right calf, so pulling on trousers or putting on shoes was difficult. Surgery had left me with nerve pain, scar tissue and oedema: the feeling that my leg had been hollowed out and then repacked with damp and heavy kapok and stitched back together, like an old teddy bear.
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We’re back …

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Sue Wootton

After three and a half years in hibernation, Corpus is back. We will soon be publishing some fresh posts. The site has remained online since we went into hiatus in March 2021 and still attracts several hundred visitors each month reading the back-posts.

We are now under the banner of Otago University Press. With the assistance of University of Otago Humanities Internship programme, we are looking forward to publishing new pieces on a semi-regular basis.

Whether you are a subscriber or a casual reader, we hope you will enjoy the new material as well as our archive, and recommend the site to others.

Stay tuned!

In the frame

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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

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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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