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This small but painful wound has been present for two years. Wounds like this can often be healed in weeks with appropriate care.

Confessions of a wound management convert

We tend to have mixed feelings towards recent converts, admiring, say, the newly reformed smoker for their hard work but being irritated by their lecturing of those recalcitrants still puffing away. Our vegan teenage niece is close to being shoved out the door but what would we do without the passion of youth? Our colleague returns from a weekend workshop and is suddenly giving us lectures on the value of manual handling and OH&S.

I must now confess to finding myself a convert – to the wonderful world of chronic wound care. After 23 years in the one practice in Nimbin I was somewhat adrift when I left it almost two years ago. I landed on the shores of a multi-disciplinary wound clinic in Brisbane (Wound Innovations) and it has become my new medical home.

Details: Written by: Dr Dan Oxlee; Published: 08 June 2019

The Writer’s Voice

by Janis Balodis, director and playwright

The writer’s tool is language. We are all born into language, but what if the one we are born into is not the one we end up speaking? What are the forces in our lives that determine our use of language, that prompt or stifle our need to speak? And how does the writer find his or her authentic voice?

Details: Written by: Janis Balodis; Published: 08 June 2019

We all call Lismore home

I been to cities that never close down
From New York to Rio and Old London Town
But no matter how far or how wide I roam
I still call… Lismore… home

(With apologies to Peter Allen)

It is widely believed, to quote a government report on culturally and linguistically diverse communities, CALD in the jargon, that Australia is “a successful and vibrant multicultural nation, with nearly half its population either born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas”.

Details: Written by: Robin Osborne; Published: 08 June 2019

My Dancing with the Stars experience

Having family, friends and patients going through their cancer journeys I am very happy to support the wonderful work of the Cancer Council, which raises money to help patients in many different ways and to help fund research with the aim of a cancer free future.

Less spontaneous, for a surgeon who hasn’t danced properly for 30 years, was accepting an invitation for this year’s Dance for Cancer in Lismore. The decision was both exciting and scary, but I soon found myself in the hands of amazing teachers - thank you to Martin and Heather Elphinstone. They have taken me from being a dance leader, the largest in my long-ago ballet class, to being a follower - no easy task. They have also taken me into the amazing world of Cuban dancing, such an elegant style and so much fun to do.

Details: Written by: Sally Butchers, Surgeon, Lismore Base Hospital; Published: 04 June 2019

Book Review - No Friend but the Mountains

No Friend but the Mountains

Behrouz Boochani

Picador 374pp

Of the hundreds – or is it thousands? – of asylum seekers who have been detained in the “holding centres” of Christmas Island, Port Hedland, Nauru, Manus and Port Moresby none is likely to be as recognisable as the Kurdish-Iranian Behrouz Boochani whose book, dictated to an interpreter via WhatsApp on his cell phone has taken the Australian literary world by storm.