Doug Lilly
Many people think of the hospice as a place where people with cancer go to die. Back in 2014, when I frequently walked past the Otago Community Hospice building in Dunedin’s North East Valley on my way home, that was my impression. What a sad place that must be to work, I thought. Although I practically lived on its doorstep, I had only ventured into this daunting place once. My partner had asked me to drop off a gift to a friend who was a hospice inpatient. I agreed, but only to leave it at reception. I didn’t want to go any further, in case I encountered dying people.
Like most people, despite ‘bearing witness’ to thousands upon thousands of deaths (both real and imagined) through images in the news and in film and television, my exposure to the reality of death and the dying process was minimal. When I went to the funeral home to view my father’s body in 2003, I was so uncomfortable about real death that I could only manage to look at him for a matter of seconds. When my mother had a serious stroke a few years later, I spent time with her as she slowly deteriorated, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and extended family. I was not present when she died, but when asked if I wanted to see her body, I declined, remembering how traumatic I had found trying to view my father’s body years earlier.
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has been described, perhaps accurately, as a one-in-one-hundred-years event, but during its history New Zealand has a number of “scares” and lockdowns because of infectious diseases that have had detrimental impacts on Māori. In 2020, the memory of these epidemics has led some Māori communities to attempt to 
Eight weeks post-op, a simple procedure to inject Botox into my pelvic floor and I was done with the pain. During a trip to town to see the GP (again), a 40-minute drive with a tennis ball under my nono, I’d felt a strong urge to scream. The pain was unbearable. After the GP I drove for another hour – my current idea of hell (the driving bit) because everything from my vagina down to my foot goes numb. I worked my shift at the library, and when I got home the bloody fire wouldn’t start. Let’s just say the fire copped an earful. Thankfully I live alone.
This is not how I imagined medical school. I thought it was going to have more cardiac arrests, more trauma and more helicopters. Instead, my days as a trainee intern are spent writing up discharge summaries for consultants who I mostly never see. We’re meant to have our own patients – take a history, examine and diagnose. But the hospital is saturated with junior medical staff and deficient in patients. I guess it’s not a bad thing. Ever since we found a way to treat disease by providing treatment specific to a patient’s genetic code we haven’t seen anywhere near the amount of patients that we used to. Well, so the consultants say. But still, I sometimes wish something big would happen.