However, as I canvassed everyone, a nurse on the night shift told me a story I will never forget.
In fact, I noted when talking to hospital staff involved in his intimate care, they would betray their fears for him without even knowing it – a slight tremor at the mention of his name. Everyone worried that he did not have long to live. Such was the hospital’s concern for him that a suggestion had been floated that he live in intensive care. He was so concerned for his parents’ well-being. His parents, who lived a 60-kilometre ambulance ride away from the Children’s Hospital, could only submit to two sleepless nights before Ronny insisted on returning to the hospital. What made matters grave was that he had also started cardiac arresting, although his heart according to the cardiologists was ‘as strong as an ox’. By then, Ronny had suffered numerous respiratory arrests, each one threatening his life, following his first arrest on the occasion of his eleventh birthday party. The first young man I was to meet was twelve. But such a life-threatening asthma, referred to as ‘brittle’, could happen almost any time day or night, seemingly with little or no warning. A ‘good patient’ was calm and enduring, and such manners were certainly expected of the family members concerned. Such suffering, as I was to learn, had no ‘voice’, no vocabulary and no place in the biomedical discourses. We began to collaborate around those children, adolescents and their families who were suffering the experience of life-threatening, chronic and often disabling asthma. Around that time, I began a very valued association with Dr Innes Asher, a respiratory physician at the Department of Paediatrics, University of Auckland. This was first published as Chapter 16 in Narrative therapy and community work: A conference collection (Adelaide, Dulwich Centre Publications, 1999).Ĭo-research was a term I concocted in a very specific set of circumstances to describe to myself and others a practice at considerable variance to ‘family therapy’ of the late 1970s.
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