Physiotherapy – Corpus

Ghost School: learning to live

27 March 2017 1 Comment

Rachel Stedman

I began working in healthcare when I was a student, before graduating into physiotherapy and, more latterly, working for ACC, Ministry of Health and a number of District Health Boards. That’s thirty-something years in total. Scary, how time flies.

I also write fiction. So, given my working life has been in healthcare, I suppose it was inevitable that at least one book would be set in the world of a hospital. After all: write what you know. This is the story of that book, and how I discovered that, despite a lifetime in the sector, I knew next to nothing about healthcare.

Ways of Seeing?

6 February 2017 2 Comments

Bruce Summers

My father-in-law, Eric Leary, was totally blind from the age of eight. During an impromptu children’s game of cricket on waste ground, somewhere in the East End of London, he was struck in the eye by a potato. This was in the 1920s: the bat was a plank of wood, the stumps a cardboard box, and the pitch just the distance from ‘ball’ to ‘bat’. The ball, of course, was the potato that changed his life forever. He was treated at Moorfields Eye Hospital but developed ‘complementary’ blindness in the other eye a few days later and subsequently had both eyes enucleated. Eric’s reaction to total blindness, as a child, was simple acceptance but later, as an adolescent and adult, he came to consider his accident as good fortune and an asset.

[Read more…] about Ways of Seeing?

The Case of the Missing Body

18 July 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

The language of the body is amazing… I couldn’t hear it but the physiotherapist could.” Jenny Powell

Like the ‘disembodied lady’ described by Oliver Sacks, poet and teacher Jenny Powell has lived her life without a sense of body. Confused and frustrated by her inability to feel connected to her joints and her movements, she started to investigate, piecing together a comprehensive picture of her condition. The result is a fascinating and informative book: The Case of the Missing Body (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016)