“Journaling Cancer in Words and Images”

EXCERPTS

Journaling Cancer in Words and Images, Caught in the Clutch of the Crab was recently published by Door County summer resident Harriet Claire Wadeson. In facing the challenge of cancer, she felt the need to tell her story. In addition to being a memoir, her book features an accompanying CD of 70 full-color pictures, primarily paintings and collages she made of her cancer experience during treatment.

Creative Expression
Cancer imposed its own special kind of helplessness as I was cut open and parts were either removed or irradiated and blasted with chemicals that destroyed cells and interfered with my physiological functioning…I needed to do something, to be active to oppose my resignation to the tortures imposed upon me. I needed to assert my personhood as I passively underwent frightening, debilitating, and humiliating procedures.

[…] Writing and painting, even if about the pain in your current reality, lift you beyond that reality into a world of your own creation. There is a strange paradox here. Although the focus is on what may be suffering, perhaps even the reliving of an excruciating experience, that focus is enveloped in another focus, which is the creative experience itself…

Restless Everything
When Rodriguez does a pelvic, I make the mistake of asking him what he is looking for. Before, I had thought he was monitoring my healing from the surgery, but why would he have to do that now? He says he is checking for tumors in the pelvic floor and abdomen this kind of cancer can spawn. Something else for me to dread.

I have a long wait in the Kellogg Cancer Center because Rodriguez hasn’t signed the chemo order. Another flub? After the infusion eventually gets going, I am partially knocked out, but awake enough to know I have restless legs. I can’t stop moving them. Then I get restless everything else and keep jumping up out of my chair, sitting in another chair, jumping up, and coming back to the first one. A couple of nurses are yelling at me to stay still because I will interfere with the chemo flow. I don’t even answer them.

Next I wake up in a hospital bed. I don’t remember being moved. I keep trying to push down the sides so I can escape.

Neena had stayed with me during all the hours of my previous chemo sessions, but since I slept through them, this time after getting me settled she has gone to her office at Northwestern. When she returns she can’t find me and no one she asks knows where I am. Eventually she locates me in the room with the bed. Later she tells me I kept asking to go to the bathroom every 15 minutes. In the bed my legs looked as though I was running, she says. When they finally unhook me, the nurse says I have been there an extra hour because my moving compressed the chemo infusion tube…Later I painted the experience.

At the End of Treatment
My hairless head and the back of my neck are always cold. I wear a knit cap all the time now, even in bed.

I have joined my father and my brother,
But not my mother.
Like the boys, I now am bald.

I am hot-headed, I am told,
But now my head is always cold.
I feel as though my life has stalled.

Despite wigs and many a hat,
You can be quite certain that
I never get mistook.

Without an eyelash or eyebrow,
Like a cue ball now,
I have that pathetic cancer look.”

Recovery from Chemo
…Tonight, I ‘come out’ at the Portia meeting, baring my head without wig or hat. Joanna says I look fabulous and others are equally complimentary. I look as though I am wearing a small white cap with a fringe of curls in the back, much more ‘with it’ than my long mane. My new hair feels like moss. And my head is mossy inside too.

I take the train downtown (which last summer I thought I would never be able to do again) to give an invited speech to the art therapy students at the Art Institute of Chicago and to visit the Hollis Sigler Breast Cancer Journal exhibit at the Cultural Center…A woman approaches me to tell me how ‘snappy’ I look in my blue plaid wool beaked cap. It is the one I bought for Daddy in Scotland to match his bright blue eyes. He wore it endlessly until he was no longer here to wear anything. This is the first time I have ever worn it in the 15 years since his death. It fits me well and is very comfortable. And yes, snappy.

Harriet Claire Wadeson has published seven other books on art therapy. She directs the art therapy program at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and spends her summers in Ellison Bay, WI.
Journaling Cancer in Words and Images may be ordered from Charles C. Thomas Publidher, Ltd. by calling 1.800.258.8980, emailing [email protected] or visiting amazon.com.