Pyracanthas.

Abstract

The poem came to me after a particularly bruising appointment with a doctor at the practice I was then a patient at. It was after this encounter that I transferred to another practice. The practice was rated then as requiring improvement, and as a School Improvement Officer retired through ill health I understood what the implications were. I think this painful recall of my previous role had an influence on the arrival of the poem. I certainly was not expecting to write it. Since developing ataxia, I set myself the task of making my writing move from 'Mawkish to Hawkish', a metaphor I used when l asked to contribute to the 'Storying Sheffield' project under Professor Brendan Stone (http://www.storyingsheffield.com/project/). The metaphor of "trams" used in this project was chosen to represent tram stops in the city and I have used it subsequently in presentations to illustrate something about what rehabilitation can entail. The "Burden-gift" of living with rare diseases is something I have found clinicians have found hard to encounter and acknowledge that these are "new" to them, and patients being ambassadors a challenge; I have seen doctors Googling their queries as they turn away to go down the corridor, to return moments later to continue the appointment....Nature is generally perceived as being healing, and yet here was someone indifferent, impatient and unwilling to hear what my expert team at a Centre for Excellence were saying - so different in nature to what I had hoped for in that appointment.This variety of Pyracanthas might be named 'Schadenfreude'.