Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

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

“That other anatomy”: how can spirituality sit alongside science?

1 October 2018 4 Comments

Kirstie McKinnon

Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts. Recently I read Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf. She proposes a step by step scenario in which we notice, yes, our thoughts, but go further, to notice the attitude of our thoughts, and then go further, to change the thoughts. Radical stuff, she calls it DIY neurosurgery.

It’s a difficult book for me to endorse because it’s not secular. Caroline Leaf quotes the Bible throughout and is very sure. I’m wary of anyone who’s sure of anything. Yet I learnt from engagement with the deep focused thinking programme she outlines. I’ve puzzled over this, a lot.

A Box of Bones (part 1)

1 October 2018 8 Comments

Sue Wootton

Searching recently for a good read-aloud children’s story, I pulled from the bottom of the bookshelf How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. Young Tom lives with his aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She’s no soft-hearted dearest Auntie Fidge. She is aways, strictly, Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, a woman who “wore an iron hat, and took no nonsense from anyone.” In Quentin Blake’s illustrations she’s a big-beamed human battleship wearing a rivetted-on grey dress and a high grey helmet. Tom – colourful, cheeky, cheerful – is clearly dancing circles around her. Readers naturally side with Tom. He’s all risk and movement. He’s teetering and testing, nimble, flexible, curious and persistent. He’s full of life. Poor old Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong makes flowers droop and trees shiver. Ridiculous in her rigid posture, bound tight by her unbending rules, she represents a fatal stillness of the soul, a kind of living death.

When I was eighteen, I found myself in the presence of a someone very like Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. She taught anatomy at the school of physiotherapy where I was enrolled as a first year student. Wide-hipped and waistless, with an imposing ledge of a bosom, whenever she walked into the room we tender blossoms drooped. She stomped, each footstep an insult to the floor. I would eventually learn to figure out where a person was hurting by watching them walk: low back, tummy, ribcage, shoulder, neck, head, hip, knee, archilles tendon – the site of pain always lends a signature adjustment to the gait. But even as-yet untrained, I could tell that Ms Anatomy Wonkham-Strong was through-and-through sore. Some long-ago irritation had lodged within her, had spread through her entire body, and vibrated out into any environment through which she moved.

The treasures we surround ourselves with …

24 September 2018 3 Comments

Max Reid

woodcut by Janet de Wagt — Woodcut by Janet de Wagt

Some years ago, I was managing a large not-for-profit aged residential care facility in Wellington. We offered a range of rest home, hospital and dementia level care, and we were operating in a very competitive market, a market increasingly dominated by private ‘for profit’ aged care providers.

A perennial question for organisations in the aged residential care sector – be they private or not-for-profit – is, ‘What makes what we offer distinctive?’ Even earlier in my career, while undertaking a business degree, I remember a marketing lecturer defining the three key aspects of ‘market distinctiveness’:

You have to be either the biggest, demonstrably the best, or the most innovative.”

Sound enough concepts in themselves, perhaps, but somewhat difficult in a sector (like aged residential care) where virtually every aspect of the service you provide is detailed in standardised specifications and contracts, and then audited to within an inch of a contract’s life.

“There’s no science for goodbye”

24 September 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Aspiring Daybook by Annabel Wilson describes a year in the life of a young New Zealander, Elsie Winslow, whose carefree travels in Europe are interrupted by a phone call:

A phone call in the middle of the night. Not a good sign.
Out of context, the wrong time, too early or too late.
Malevolent omen. So often the sound of bad news.

And it is bad news. Elsie’s brother has cancer. She boards a long haul flight, heading home to help look after him. Time, place, light – all these reliable fundamentals seem to be falling apart. “I’m on a plane, going forward in time, back into the past … Today is New Year’s Day, and it’s getting erased.” Elsie’s journal becomes a kind of touchstone, or navigation tool, for piecing together a new reality on the other side of this catastrophic news. [Read more…] about “There’s no science for goodbye”

Questions of shame

24 September 2018 3 Comments

Emer Lyons

When my mother reads one of my poems that uses the personal pronoun ‘I’
And the word queer to describe myself
She gets all worked up, all don’t be showing this to your auntie and only upsetting her
My mother doesn’t care that the LGBTQI community have reclaimed queer
Or that when a poet writes a poem using ‘I’ it’s not necessarily their perspective

[Read more…] about Questions of shame