Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Circles

2 December 2019 7 Comments

Millie O’Neill

As a child, you always see your parents as these invincible super-humans. After all, they did put up with my psychologically traumatic teenage hormones at their peak. Parents want to protect you, they put on a brave face, they try to shelter you from what is dark in life. But sometimes they can’t, and sometimes, it’s important for them not to. When someone you see as so incredibly strong is forcibly made weak by disease, it’s an adjustment, to say the least. Before he got cancer, I had only seen my father fighting for me, and in that battle he was undefeated.

The poem below is about the circular patterns and routines of life, and how something as incomprehensible as cancer can put it all into perspective. Suddenly so much that was so important seems trivial. I realise what I took for granted: the moments I should have savoured; the conversations I should have had in the car on the way to school instead of glaring at a screen. Suddenly it’s a struggle to go to do simple things, like open your book in class, or maintain a bubbly and bright aura in front of peers. Everything seems superficial and inauthentic to life’s true purpose. Everyone’s complaints about minor everyday problems enrage you. When events like this give us a broader perspective, sometimes our philosophy of life changes.

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Dreaming with my body

2 December 2019 Leave a Comment

Rata Gordon

“Dreaming with my body” follows on from a previous article by Rata Gordon, “Expressive Arts Therapy: Arts-based research and new motherhood”, which you can read here.

Motherhood is undervalued. And I feel like my culture’s view of what a mother should be is limited. I have a sense of somehow trying to claw back a self that is individuated from my child and active in the public sphere, because the question looms: is being just a mother enough? And what constitutes a good enough mother in the face of climate change, mass extinctions and a global mental health crisis? My child must live in this world.

I am trying to be intimate with the world around me, feeling the sharp edges with my toe and tasting the salt water with my tongue.

I wonder whether Attachment Theory’s usual version of a good enough mother, in terms of wiping your child’s nose, having ordinary devotion, cuts it. How can I nurture not only my own child, but the world that I am bringing her into, and all that I love?

I have found that there is no greater opportunity for being told how to think, act, breathe and scratch my nose than becoming a mother. A whole flurry of social and cultural institutions, norms and practices would like to dictate how I mother, and who I am now that I’m a mother. They land like fine silt, becoming denser and heavier with time if I don’t move beneath them.

I want to feel that the stories I tell are true, but I also want to show that there are other possible untold stories lingering underneath and in between.

Menstruation, myth, and medicine

2 December 2019 Leave a Comment

Sandy Thomson-Conklin

Otago Girls High School. Image courtesy McNab Collection.

I was twelve years old, munching away on some crackers in the back garden when I noticed an uncomfortable wetness in my knickers. I hopped to the loo and was surprised to discover that I had got my first period. I immediately grasped what had happened; my mother is a nurse and my family has a decidedly casual attitude towards the human body and its functions. I ran and proudly shared my news. Tearing up, Mum explained how I was now a young woman. Together we went over the practical accoutrements, and she presented me with a silver necklace adorned with hearts to mark the occasion (and satiate my rampant preteen consumerism). Though my experience of the bloody menses itself is not new or unique, I have learned that the openness and practical knowledge is. Roughly fifty percent of the world’s population is biologically female, and almost all females will menstruate for some 3,000 days in their lives. Most girls begin their monthly bleed between the ages of 11-16, and will continue to bleed for five (give or take) days each month for the next 30 years. Societally, menstrual blood is taboo. Historically, it has been taken as evidence of females being the ‘weaker sex.’ Keeping this shameful secret shrouded is a long-running custom. Time and time again inferiority has been upheld through religion, the medical profession, or internalised shame passed from mother to daughter.

In 1948, a young female medical student at the Otago School of Medicine, M. W. Wray, investigated menstruation as part of her fifth year Preventative Medicine dissertation. She found a serious lack of information about the average girl’s experience in New Zealand. Rather than accepting the status quo, Wray decided to collect some data. 120 permission slips were sent to parents of students at Otago Girls High School, requesting their daughters be interviewed about menstruation. A mere half of the permissions were returned signed, and fewer than sixty girls were interviewed.

Let there be light: macular degeneration and me

4 November 2019 6 Comments

Renée

Let there be warriors…

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be regarded as warriors.” Adrienne Rich.

I was taught to read before I was five by my mother Rose. I read stories, then long books, then joined the library, changed both Rose’s and my books, read both, went out to work at the woollen mill when I was twelve and read my way around libraries wherever I worked. I worked at all sorts of jobs then, when I was forty, began studying for an extra mural BA degree. I began teaching in my forties and at fifty I began writing plays. Since then I have read and written (worked) every day. Now I am 90. I’ve just finished teaching a course on writing memoir, and The Cuba Press has just published my first crime novel, The Wild Card.

Two years ago I was told I had macular degeneration.

This is a desolate and unhappy place to be. Being labelled ‘vision impaired’ doesn’t go anywhere near describing the impact of it on my life. As a reader and a working writer it is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

The Big Red Ride: a community bike programme

4 November 2019 5 Comments

Annie Tredray

For the past ten years, I’ve been a physiotherapist at Mineral Springs Hospital in Banff, Alberta; Canada. Witnessing long term care residents live a mostly sedentary life did not resonate well with me. I saw the effects repeatedly: deteriorating functionality and simple lack of satisfaction with daily living. Some people would beg me to take them outside and, once there, they would lament that they were no longer able to walk around and enjoy their surroundings. Despite often severe disabilities, it was obvious that residents still craved opportunities to be active outdoors.

In 2015 I attended an Exercise Prescription and Aging conference. There I learned some hard data about Canada’s fast-aging population. According to Statistics Canada, the number of 85-year-olds will more than double between 2016 and 2036. By 2036, 62 percent of all healthcare spending will be on those aged over 65. Furthermore, while many adults are healthy in their later years, there is also an increasing number of seniors living with fraility. Frailty comes with more complex health challenges. Both social connectivity and physical activity are necessary components for healthy aging for any adult over 65 years, whether or not they are frail.

Expressive Arts Therapy: Arts-based research and new motherhood

4 November 2019 6 Comments

Rata Gordon

Baby Ursula eating a page of careful research.

It’s dark. I can hear the whirr of the heater and an eager bird outside. The others are still asleep and I have sneaked down here to write. I recently described my tiredness as desperate. There are very few things I would give up sleep for at the moment, but one of them is writing. When I do it right, it gives me energy, rather than taking it away.

Writing that feels good to do is full-bodied. It comes from my slippered ankles, my warm insides, the space between my fingers, my chilly nape. It plants words that are alive on the page. Writing that feels bad to do – the kind that gives me a neck ache – feels like forming boring biscuits from just my brain.

Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” Hélène Cixous.

Ursula is nearly one now and my body has been ballooning out, birthing, spouting milk, withering, coming back to life. All I have is the time before she wakes up to do this, so I’m going to have to just let it slip out somehow. Speak, body!