Nasim Marie Jafry's Blog, page 15

Too much lactic acid in her legs

In my novel,  the main character Helen Fleet has a series of sarcastic/humorous exchanges with a stranger. Describing how she feels after trivial exercise (remember this is the eighties), she says she has too much lactic acid in her legs.
This has been validated in research reported in the Times the other day:  Professor Julia Newton's study found that PWME produce up to 20 times more lactic acid than healthy controls: 'The finding shows ME leads to a cascade of physical changes righ...

Fiction, memoir and consensus criteria

Charming article from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  on fiction and memoir, she says: 'I long for a new form, a cross between fiction and memoir...' and speaks for us all when she says that 'fiction is more honest than memoir'. This is exactly why I wrote The State of Me as a novel and not a memoir, I wanted to get closer to the truth, as I described here. Also, I love that she is so laidback about fiction and memoir overlapping.
I'm re-reading 'On Being Ill', Virginia Woolf's brilliant essay...

Margins, B-cells behaving badly, and a wee dance

Interesting post  - and discussion - on medical humanities and literary medicine from the Centre for Medical Humanities Blog. And a wee reminder that I'm reading extracts from The State of Me at Dissecting Edinburgh event  'Writing Medicine'  on 2 May. I  often say I live on  the margins of the writing life, so it's lovely to be joining the mainstream for an hour or two. Is the first time I've read from the novel since 2008. Tickets here (free!), though I'm told there...

Poetry of dementia (2)

Last weekend, I was googling Greenland just to see if I could find anything of interest for my stepdad (he grew up there in thirties and forties), and we came across this article from the Independent on how they can now grow vegetables in Southern Greenland because of warmer temperatures. I printed the article and he read it a couple of times. Where did you get this? he asked, fascinated. The internet, I replied, everything is on the internet now. That's great, he said, I didn't know the inte...

ME Awareness Day Event, May 12

Great poster promoting 'All Fall Down' event, especially the wording: 'Symptoms fluctuate from day to day, hour to hour. Sufferers may look well and be able to function for a short time, but consequently have to 'pay' afterwards, with days, weeks or longer, housebound or bedbound, witnessed only by close family'. This aftermath is known as post-exertional  malaise (PEM), recently described as PENE (post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion), the hallmark symptom of classic ME, which many di...

Why do we read fiction?

Can reading literature make doctors better doctors was one of the questions posed at a 'Dissecting Edinburgh' event last month. It made me think of James Wood's How Fiction Works where he describes how in 2006 a Mexican municipal president decided that his police force should be prescribed reading certain novels - One Hundred Years of Solitude was on the list -  to make them 'better citizens'. And psychologist Keith Oatley speaks of fiction as a 'kind of simulation that runs on minds', a...

Harry

At first, I hated the squirrel thieving from the birdfeeder, but now I love him  - he could be a she, but I call him Harry - and worry if I haven't seen him for a couple of days. Last week, he jumped into the magpies' nest and they chased him. Bizarrely, the magpies' nest has now shrunk to a few twigs, so I guess they have moved housed (I asked RSPB if magpies dismantle their nests and take them with them, but they said more likely other birds have been using bits of abandoned nest). The...

Disability and culture

Interesting podcasts/discussions on cultural representations of disability from Centre for Medical Humanities.  I've just listened to Beyond the ‘Narrative of Overcoming’: Representations of Disability in Contemporary French Culture Sam Haigh (University of Warwick).

Last week: magpies, a tiger, & an elephant in the room

Last week: I cried watching Malala Yousafzai going back to school: what an extraordinary young woman;  I saw a squirrel get into a magpies' nest and be chased out. I still haven't figured out where the squirrel lives, the drey - or what I thought was a drey - seems to be occupied by pigeons; and I've been reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga and loving it.
A friend in Italy sent me this  seven minute link to Dr Kenny de Meirleir speaking about the importance of the Canadian crite...

Last week...

Last week: I cried watching Malala Yousafzai going back to school: what an extraordinary young woman;  I saw a squirrel get into a magpies' nest and be chased out. I still haven't figured out where the squirrel lives, the drey - or what I thought was a drey - seems to be occupied by pigeons; and I've been reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga and loving it.
A friend in Italy sent me this  seven minute link to Dr Kenny de Meirleir speaking about the importance of the Canadian crite...