Northern Michigan University’s Senior Art Show. I walk from piece to piece through a crowd of excited students, their friends, their parents. It’s warm in the museum, a crush of bodies and winter coats and excited speaking. And then I see the black and white photographs along one wall: two legs from underneath a hospital gown, one smaller than the other, discolored, bruised. Feet in a bathtub. Feet on a bed of nails. And under the photographs, a small table with a book: Living with RSD. A sunflower on its cover.
I stare at the photographs, their gray shades, stare at the book, try to make sense of what I’m seeing. Two legs like my own legs once looked. Depictions of pain. I feel myself sweating. Spinning. My legs pulsing with blood. I’m suddenly filled with shame. This illness that shaped my childhood, that I kept hidden from most of my friends, that was completely misunderstood by teachers, relatives— hanging on the wall of an art museum for anyone to see. Exposed. My biggest secret captured and displayed.
Then I overhear a student speaking with her mother. ‘How does it feel to see yourself up there?’ she asks. I turn to look: her mother stands with crutches under her arms. I interrupt, say to the mother, ‘Are you the one with RSD?’ I realize that my words are abrupt, that I’ve stepped outside my politeness training, my training in disability. The woman at first seems taken aback, then nods her head. ‘I had RSD too,’ I say. ‘Growing up. I had it for eight years.’ And suddenly the daughter is crying, and her mother is crying, and I’m concentrating hard not to cry as well.
The woman starts asking me questions: what treatments did I have? What hospitals? What stage was my diagnosis? How did I reach remission? We’re speaking the language of medicine, of pain, a secret club for a secret illness. I write down the name of my treatments, offer to share my medical records.
‘This is exactly what I was hoping would happen,’ the daughter says as we exchange cards, phone numbers. And I think, yes. This is one thing art does, isn’t it? Brings our deepest hurts to the light, helps those hurts speak to another, connects us to another. Saves us from feeling utterly alone. Saves us from despair.
Gregory Orr writes, ‘That poem you love,/ That saved your life,/ Wasn’t it given to you?’ My anesthesiologist gave me the poem that saved my life while he administered one of my final treatments for RSD: ‘The Journey’ by Mary Oliver. I loved my anesthesiologist like I have loved no other doctor—he read me poetry regularly, asked about my dreams, told me his, played me his favorite music, took me seriously, a teenage girl no one else much believed. When the veins collapsed in my foot and he couldn’t get an IV started to administer a treatment, he cried, apologized again and again. When I struggled with dizziness waking up from anesthesia, he sat with me, held my hand, made me laugh until my blood pressure rose enough for me to be released.
Poetry spoken in a hospital’s recovery room. Photographs hung on a museum wall. Stories shared from person to person. Because art can save our lives. Art can record the secrets we didn’t know we should share. Can bring them to the light. Can free us of them. Art can be given to us in unexpected ways, at unexpected times. Kindness, too. I hug the student and her mother. Walk the rest of the show with sorrow in my heart. And lightness. And hope. A secret pain shared with another. Released.
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Planet of the Blind 