Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Euthanasia and the common good

2 July 2018 10 Comments

Charlotte Paul

When I started thinking hard about euthanasia, I visited my friend who has a progressive illness affecting his body and mind, and who is in hospital-level care. His partner has moved into the same residence to help look after him. She responds to his suffering with love, and you can sometimes see in his eyes that he recognises this. I honour them both: his endurance and gratitude; her generosity.

But, with euthanasia in mind, I think about them both in a different way. Is his suffering unbearable? Although he wouldn’t be competent to make a request for euthanasia, should it become legal in New Zealand, their situation calls into question the value of his endurance and her generosity.

In what follows I explore my intuition that actively ending suffering by causing death undercuts the meaning of suffering.

The ‘coming out’ of pregnancy

2 July 2018 3 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Jacinda Ardern and Clarke Gayford — Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and her partner Clarke Gayford, at Buckingham Palace.

The April 2018 photo of heavily pregnant New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern at Buckingham Palace was more than beautiful, it represented a landmark moment in political life. Pregnancy, once invisible, was centre stage.

In the early twentieth century, respectable citizens kept pregnancy under wraps. It was part of that troublesome thing: women’s bodies. Those bodies bled, ballooned during pregnancy, and leaked milk during lactation. None of these things seemed appropriate in public life. They appeared to make women closer to nature, while men assumed the mantle of culture. Women’s bodily changes were matters to be hidden, controlled, and best not discussed.

Humour: a tool to knock you off your pedestal

25 June 2018 1 Comment

Alexander Torrie

For hundreds of years doctors have been placed on a pedestal, achieving a form of celebrity and authority over the lay person. Only doctors, went the logic, understood the confusing puzzle that is the human body. Only doctors could translate its strange signs and symptoms into a language that made sense. This attitude gave rise to paternalistic medicine, a system that implies that an individual’s healthcare is the sole responsibility of the physician. Paternalistic medicine gives the physician the power to make whatever decision they think is in the patient’s best interests, regardless of the actual capacity or desires of the patient.

The revolutionary pencil

25 June 2018 3 Comments

Annette Rose

'Tremors' by Jilleen Brice. — ‘Tremors’ by Jilleen Brice.

There’s nothing remarkable about a pencil, one would think. But simply by drawing off the page and over the edges of the desk and along the floor and up the walls and out the window and off over the fields, a person can draw a new horizon to aspire to … who knows how radical a doodle can be? Drawing can be a revolutionary act.

My sister has recently taken up that revolutionary pencil. She used to draw and take photographs but life’s demons had dragged her down and she had not done so since the 1970s. Now, however, despite a body crippled by multiple sclerosis (the “glass half-full” kind, slowly progressing), a mental state depleted by depression and chronic post-traumatic stress, and a spirit broken by 30,000 earthquakes (she lives in Christchurch), every day she manages to get up and settle at the kitchen table to do her ‘Arting’, as she calls it. As Franz Kafka wrote:

You do not have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You do not even have to listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked …”

Song for Rosaleen: “the heartbreak that is dementia”

25 June 2018 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

A memoir, by definition, is composed of memories. It is almost unbearably poignant, then, that Song for Rosaleen is a memoir that exists only because of memory loss. Written by Wellington oral historian and editor Pip Desmond, it documents her mother’s slide into vascular dementia and the effects of this on the entire family.

Perhaps this sounds grim – and of course in many ways it is. But Song for Rosaleen is gripping. It is at one level a personal account, at another a meditation on memory itself, and at yet another an erudite critique of how our society treats the frail, dependent and voiceless. For this latter reason alone it should be essential reading for everyone who works in health: management, non-clinical and clinical staff alike.

The conversation that includes everything

18 June 2018 6 Comments

Richard Anderson

“I want some help with a friend of mine because she has mental health problems and you have your own lived experience of mental health issues.”

The whispers of the past pick holes inside me as the conversation continues and I despair, as I listen to my friend’s story, that another person, somewhere out there, has to go through this stuff.

“Does she have a good relationship with her GP? Does she do the basics right? The eating, sleeping and exercising bit? Does she have any drug issues with alcohol or other drugs? What is her support network like? Are her family and friends close? Does she have a job, money coming in? Does she live alone or with people?