As a bedside artist, I work mainly with cancer patients. They are often in the hospital for weeks at a time and need simple activities to stay busy. From my experience, they also are the patients who have the most to think about, they are slammed with effects from drawn out treatments that dehumanize them- leave them with no hair, frail bodies, shaking hands, and a 2 foot free distance from their IV pole. I think that hospitals in general are a dehumanizing institution. Huge sterile buildings with tiny square rooms stacked on top of each other. The sharp smell of antibacterial everything stings. This past week, I saw a patient walking up an down the hallway countless times, he told me he felt like "a caged animal".
I don't think that what I do changes any of this. But I think that patients like to see me because I don't come into their room with a needle, or the status quo on their health. And they like to make decisions. They are in control of so little, that choosing what color origami paper gives them power.
In my opinion, cancer is somewhat glorified in our media culture today. You hear heroic stories of survivors, you see commercials with women dressed in pink walking marathons, but no one talks about the people who become severely depressed, the people who can't see straight because of all the medication they are on, and the halt it puts on lives.
Some days I can't stand what I see. A man with his legs shackled together, and a police officer on either side of him walking the halls with his IV. Sometimes I see patients who are my age. And patients sit alone in their rooms without any family.
But this week, I talked with a woman I've visited a few times. She told me that her diagnosis has been one of the best things to happen to her and that she can see so many silver linings. She has been able to slow down and do all of the things- knitting, writing cards to her friends, that she never had time to do. Her family has become a lot closer. It was so good for me to talk to her because she talked about cancer in a positive light that I had never been able to see in my experiences at home with it. She is so calm about what has happened or what might happen.
It has been hard to do this job some days because I see in some people what I see in my dad. I see things that he may experience, and I see them going through things he went through. But I also meet people who love the what they have been thrown. And they teach me that things are so much bigger than what happens in my 21-year-old college life. I have learned that strength you have to face situations cannot be harvested from physical well-being.