Instead of rising on one of the morning in 2008, my older sister Devon felt on the ground, unable to move or feel her legs. After six month of misdiagnosis, she was finally given a definitive answer for why numbness ran though her body.Her doctor causally pointed to the bright lesions now exposes on her MRI scans, and unable or unwillingly to take his eyes off the computer screen proclaimed its multiple sclerosis; and instead of answering her questions on how he could be sure, he quieted her; totally stating that he was a specialist.
Like that doctor, I too was not able to verbalize my empathy towards Devon. I lacked the words to express the pain I felt when every six months she has to lie still for hours on and on the MRI scanner, and nothing but in a flimsy hospital gown. But, perhaps by using my background as an artist and print-maker, I could create an image that can somehow show her my empathy. After receiving her latest round of scans from the hospital, Devon and I looked at them together and concluded that if these scans had a context of what it is like to live with chronic illness on a daily basis? They could have the power to create an empathetic exchange between doctors, patients and caregivers. And then set to combine my sister’s MRI scans with images from her daily life to give a more honest betrayal of living with disease.
The goals of this project are threefold. First: to better understand how identity is transformed by biomedical imaging technologies; Second: to create meaningful collaborations with those who are impacted by illness; and Third: to educate doctors in empathy creation using the fine arts.The mass amount of art work I have created thus far have been exhibited in over 20 solo and group exhibitions around the world. In the art gallery, attendees will often share their own story of impairment with me and together we created interpersonal dialogue around the patient experience and a new collaboration is formed.
My artwork is also making its way into the medical classroom. My sister is now a professor of clinical ethics and she uses the images that we have created as a teaching tool, to ignite the conversation on empathetic patient care with these future doctors. The arts based research I present, is not a final answer nor end, but an interdisciplinary untangling of the social issues surrounding the unwell body. Unlike a doctor, I’m not interested in pointing to bright lesion in MRI scans, instead I use these scans as a visual metaphor for living with disease. My aim is not to celebrate or fight difference, but to foster an ethical turn in medicine and greater society where difference accepted and respected.
Speaker, Darian Goldin Stahl is a student in the Department of Humanities at Concordia University Montreal. Life to Scans won third prize of 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) Eastern Regional competition held at University of New Brunswick Fredericton on Apr 20th, 2017.
