Rachel Stedman
I trained as a physiotherapist nearly thirty years ago, and worked in acute medicine and neuro rehabilitation in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. I ended my clinical practice about seven years back, and strangely I don’t miss it terribly; one moves onto other things.
I moved into business management and fiction writing. Rather unexpectedly, my clinical experience has proved extremely useful in my writing. Writers, you see, love healthcare. Hospitals provide dramatic opportunities, and a dramatic illness creates a chance to show something about a character. It’s not an accident that best-sellers feature terminal illnesses or genetic diseases.
[Read more…] about Unexpected benefits of a health education
By their involvement in the arts, whether poetry, painting, or writing novels, nurses and other health professionals have the opportunity to express a side of themselves which is not always possible in their day-to-day work. It is a creative way of reflecting and thinking about what they see and do and feel in their daily contact with patients.” – Lorraine Ritchie, editor of Listening with my Heart
Most of us experience the death of a parent or grandparent and the loss of the past it brings. The death of an elderly family member, however, does not threaten the family’s reason to exist, and its future hopes and dreams remain. The death of a child, however, brings with it the death of part of the parents, and the psychological death of the family. In bereavement literature there is agreement that the death of a child is almost beyond the parents’ endurance. The parent-child bond is arguably the strongest bond there is. The concept of the child as an integral part of the parent’s self is logical in that the survival of the child depends on altruistic parenting. If mother and baby did not become strongly attached the baby would die. The purpose of attachment, therefore, is the survival of the species. Thus, parenthood is deeply challenged by the death of a child.
