What do you take to your cancer caregiver job? What’s the helper device, without which you’d feel like a fool? Before you go from where you live, what must you remember to grab first?
Pen and pad? Nope. Tissues for tears? No. Handy-dandy, side-splitting, pocket-size anthology of jokes about physicians? Not necessarily.
How about: a digital camera. (When added to an email account, you can send your shots world-wide.)
Why? Can photography cure? How do you imagine imaging can fit in to fighting back against cancer?
1. Images are inclusive. Your patient’s well-wishers will include plenty of people who find email painful, or prefer to avoid long phone calls.
2. Showing’s better than telling. If a picture tells a thousand words, one shutter-snap saves gushers of spilled ink.
3. Memories are made of many flavors, for many people. What’s in the past? There’s ideas, sounds, flavors, smells, and tactile sensations, but certainly also images. Living large and strong includes “seeing” fine prior times. Color (or even black & white) excerpts of earlier events deliver more living, echoed later.
4. “They say the memory’s the 2d thing to go as we age; I forget what the first was.” Everybody forgets, with or without “chemobrain.” Snapshots save delicious data, scenes seen only in long-gone segments of life, and appreciation of days gone by.
5. Save stand-up comedy for professionals. Not everybody can tell a joke well. But sometimes a quick hand with a camera can capture “humor therapy” or “medicine via photography.”
above: The Physical Therapy Department staff at our hospital deliver “humor therapy” via arranged equipment, not just therapeutic exercise advice. (Plus, they gave me back-up for my practice, when taking photos of medical professionals, of yelling, just before the shot, not “Say Cheese!” but “Say Boogerectomy!”)
6. “Beam me up, Scotty!” Star Trek transporter technology isn’t quite yet available. But you can transport your patient’s peers, friends, co-workers, and family members there, where the cancer action is, into the medical war theatre, via photography. You can deliver an emotional link between your loved one and their wide-scattered support community, by making photographs, and then making sure they’re delivered to the team of those-who-care. You can be their eyes, on the “before, “what happened,” “how it was done,” and “after.”
above: Before: Prior cryogenic (negative 130 degrees Celsius) preservation of my bride’s stem cells is ending, as specialist nurse gently, briefly thaws one of six bags that will “return” a working supply of blood marrow and hence an immune system to my cancer patient, after receiving mega-radiation – not an everyday sight.
above: After: Stem cell transplant completed – my bride drained 6 bags full of her adult hematopoietic progenitor cells, collected last year via apheresis.
Cameras come cheap now, thanks to many microelectronics innovations. Rechargeable batteries protect our battered planet. There are no local-pharmacy processing charges, when you shoot digital.
That’s how I see it. What do you see?
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