Sue Wootton
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship.” Susan Sontag.
The idea that health and illness are different states, sometimes to the point of being completely different territories or countries has proved to be an enduring and powerful metaphor. Virginia Woolf, for example, in her 1930 essay “On Being Ill”, wrote of the distance between the worlds of the well and the ill, and of how different those two worlds feel to their inhabitants. She described the ‘daylight’ quality of health, which is a place of community, purpose, business and busy-ness. But, she noted, in the same way that daylight obliterates the ever-present skyful of stars, so when “the lights of health go down” the “undiscovered countries” of illness are revealed. We all have another homeland, that strange and disconnected place where nothing seems to go to plan:
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Susan Sontag.
This week – 7-15 April – is Dunedin Pride Week. Every year, during Pride celebrations across New Zealand, people ask why we still need Pride. Why do we still celebrate it after marriage equality? Why be so loud? What does Pride even mean? There isn’t a straightforward answer.
Today at work I arrived early, changed my shirt, tied my hair. I ate an apple in the break room before handover at four o’clock. It’s time to go, three of us carers on this shift. In the nurses’ station we get a list and a walkie talkie.
After almost thirty years as a doctor, I have started writing fiction. I have recently completed a collection of short stories called Admissions which includes tales of eight different women working in the same crumbling public hospital in the far south of Aotearoa. Sounds familiar? For those of us who have worked at the coal-face of clinical medicine, my stories may not surprise or shock, but I hope they are tales of our common humanity and shared experiences. Perhaps this is the main reason I write: I want to tell stories which unite us.
(Read the first part of Carolyn McCurdie’s reflections on this topic