At dawn on March 11th 1943, the 3351 Jewish people living in Monastir, Macedonia (what was Yugoslavia then) were rounded up from Monastir, and incarcerated, with all other Macedonian Jews. 7350 people crammed into the old Monopol tobacco factory in Skopje. Over two hundred people died in Monopol – of sickness, or killed by the…
Snow Globes: a short story
You can’t pack a whole life into a small bag.
Mum dropped a rucksack on my bed that last day. My uniform took all the space. I put it on instead, shirt, skirt, jumper, over my jeans and t-shirt. That made room for more clothes, and school books. But what about my stuffed elephant from when I was a baby? Photos of Leo, of Dad? The snow globe Gran gave me?
You can do better than apple sauce
Apple sauce is good, don’t get me wrong. Although if it’s almost all you can eat, day after day, even the tastiest apple sauce is going to lose its appeal. But when you have trigeminal neuralgia and/or other face pain conditions, eating is a tricky business. Biting and chewing – especially crunchy, hard or chewy…
Is your TN pain really so invisible?
Trigeminal Neuralgia is often described as an invisible illness. Or an invisible disability. Or a hidden disability. Take your pick – there are several phrases used to describe the same issue – conditions that are not immediately or visibly apparent to onlookers, even doctors. Trigeminal neuralgia is a condition caused by damage to the trigeminal…
Understanding Symptoms – is this Trigeminal Neuralgia?
Trigeminal Neuralgia are two words that most people in the world have never heard. Two words that most people will never say. Even doctors. This creates a particular difficulty for people when they are diagnosed with the condition. What the eff even is trigeminal neuralgia? We might want doctors to have all the answers, but…
Noisy Creatures
One of my favourite places to write, other than my art room on a sunny morning, is a local cafe – sitting at the quiet table in the corner, between a small forest of monsterras next to the window. If we go at the right time, it’s the perfect place. Wonderful art on the walls,…
How to get the best from your neurology consultation
Getting correctly diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia is, for many people, a long, painful and frustrating business. Little training is given about it in medical school – my GP told me that he had had perhaps ten minutes teaching on TN in a lecture on neurological conditions back in his first year of training. This isn’t…
The Boy Nikolai
turning nightmares into poems
Manicures & memories
Painting my daughter’s nails is one of those precious, intimate moments of parenthood. . . a metaphor for love.
First, Joseph
He was Joseph first. Maybe Joe, Joss, Joey? Then Luke. Joseph was locked down in a prison of time and amnesia. A footnote in official certificates. He was uprooted, transplanted. Luke was a shell, a skin other people constructed for him. He was grafted into a white weatherboard house owned by a white weatherboard family,…
Verve 