existing's tricky:but to live's a gift
A postcard from Sanders Reserve Recreation Path, 180 Sanders Road, Paremoremo. A throwback to the end of July, before we went back into lockdown, when we hopped in the car on a cloudy cold day and chased the sun out to Paremoremo Creek, overlooking Waitemata harbour. Undulating trails, sandy hills, tidal mudflats, Monarch butterflies, an…
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The first time I remember being introduced to meditation was by a friend of mine during a summer working in Germany. I was struggling with a number of things, I asked her to show me how it worked. And so we sat crosslegged on the floor in our shared bedroom as she attempted to guide…
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Beautiful, amusing, thought-arresting passages from books I’ve enjoyed over the past month. I’m not one for full on reviews, but I will readily track down a book based on nothing more than a couple of sentences if they strike a chord with me. Do comment below if you’ve read any of these, and share with…
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I’m sitting at our desk in our study with the wooden slats of the blinds angled just enough to let in the light. Outside is blue sky. I can see a fantail bobbing up and down among the sun-warmed leaves of a fern tree. This is September. The past month has gone fast. Barely three…
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From the broad to the very specific. Last month I wrote about the ways in which medical encounters can be shaped by the written word, remarking upon the fact that for something that has such power and lasting impact (with the advent of electronic notes, these narratives can follow patients indefinitely), doctors receive surprisingly little…
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We started up by the Visitor Centre, meandered happily through the Edible Garden, descended down into the Arboretum, picked up the Puhinui Stream Forest Trail, hopped over a style into Tootara park, paused to watch a squabble of brightly coloured parakeets, then climbed
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On the eve of my three year anniversary in New Zealand, I wanted to pause for a moment to try write the words that I would have found comforting back in 2017, before I left.
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Driving to work, the sky is blanketed in a puffy quilt of pink and purple. Beneath it, the sun is a ribbon of pale gold. Palm trees loom darkly on the fringes of the road. Houses are black save for the brilliance reflected in their windows. The morning traffic lurches forward sleepily, unpredictably. Horns blare.
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This is a new little series that I hope will appeal as a bonus post each month on the day that my newsletter goes out! Just a small collection of beautiful or thought-arresting passages of words from whatever I’ve been reading recently. Little extracts like this are often what prompt me to seek out a…
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Medical terminology, often referred to with the pejorative term “jargon”, gets a lot of bad press. A consultant I once worked with, for whom I have the utmost respect, once asked me why so many doctors used it. It was a rhetorical question:
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Blue, green and grey. There’s nothing more soothing for the soul than this.
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For the last week at work I have been providing cover for a service that operates largely outside the realm of my knowledge and experience. I don’t say that with any false modesty.
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Work is picking up. Winter is always a busy time in Medicine. Too many people live precariously on the edge of decompensation, all it takes is a virus, a cold, to tip them over the edge. The medical take numbers are swelling. The wards are over-capacity. But quick discharges are practically non-existent.
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At medical school, we are taught to start wide and narrow down. “What brought you in?”, you might ask, before eventually getting to the specifics much much later. In real life, you learn to tailor your first question to the situation at hand. If it is 7pm and there are twenty people waiting to be seen, the way in which you allocate your time becomes a question of ethics. You rarely have the luxury of time in medicine.
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A postcard from Brick Bay Sculpture Trail, Matakana: The trail weaves over undulating land, circling around lakes, dropping down into native bush and twisting up high into a Kauri canopy. There is all kind of art on show, from the Bauhaus aesthetic to installations reminiscent of Banksy.
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Sometimes I think my whole adult life has been a struggle to subdue the aftershock of my own first love, to subjugate the feelings it engendered, to identify and begin to heal the all-encompassing damage it wrought.
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I struggle with the seasons here still, in fact it is perhaps the one thing that triggers homesickness the most. I had not realised how much I lived my life rooted in weather and landscape until those things were turned on their head, quite literally inverted.
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I have never managed to sleep the day before a night shift. It makes no sense to my body, to suddenly try nap during the day. And worse: if I let myself lie in bed too close to the beginning of a shift, eventually waves of sleepiness will start to roll over me. I’m cosy,…
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A postcard from Mahurangi Regional Park, Cudlip Point Loop Track.
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April 29th would have been my Grandfather’s 92nd birthday. He died in October, but it is only now, slowly, that my mind is beginning to accept that he is gone. I thought about him last night when I admitted a desperately unwell 92 year-old gentleman with pneumonia. I thought about him last week when I…
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Mad to Live 