Henry Fry
Adjusting to life after war has always been difficult. For amputees, artificial limbs are an essential requirement for attempting to get back a semblance of normality. In 1948, just three years after the Second World War, two University of Otago fifth year medical students, P. J. Dowsett and J. H. Heslop, did their public health dissertation about wartime amputees and aspects of artificial limbs.
Not surprisingly, they found that after the First and the Second World War, the need for prosthetics spiked. Before the Great War, there was little development or focus on artificial limbs. For centuries, the wooden leg was the most common example of what was possible. At the tail end of the First World War, the return of veteran amputees led to a great demand for prosthetic limbs. An estimated 41,000 returning British soldiers required prosthetics. The high demand prompted the introduction of more standardisation in the manufacturing process. During the interwar period, the metal artificial limb started to take over from the traditional wooden leg for the first time. By the Second World War, advances meant that prosthetics had become far more intricate than their basic predecessors.
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.
Something most of us get told early on in life is that the really influential, important people in the world are ones like politicians, policemen, professors, preachers, pontificators – the ones who make a lot of noise, a lot of money, a big impact and get the most publicity. They’re the ones who affect us most, evidently, make a difference to us, govern us, tell us what to do, keep us in order, advise us, even get us jobs … that sort of thing. But my experience tells me something different. My experience tells me that the most significant and influential people in one’s life are not the ones mentioned above, but quite different ones. I call them friends in high places. As a matter of fact, I often found them in very low places!