My kids gave me a project for Christmas, called Storyworks. It’s like writing a blog, but every Monday you get a prompt that you can choose to write about. This week it was ‘if you had to go back and choose another career, what would that be.’
Me with one of my prized coloring books.
I gave this a fair amount of thought over the week. I might like to be in research. That’s always been the best part of my job. I get a project and then research all about it. When I did a logo for a pharmacy that does compounding, I spent hours researching the morter and pestal.
What I like about research is that you start out going in one direction and along the way, depending on what you find, you may end up moving in another direction. It’s a very exciting part of any project. But thinking about another career besides art, well I just couldn’t think of one.
No matter what, I am, and most likely will always be an artist. I will always see things through the lens of artistic vision. I can’t even beleive that I was recently questioning my career as an artist! Maybe its’s those chemicals the doctors are giving me each month that are skewing my outlook.
The clinical trial gun getting ready to punch me in the arm!
Every month I go to Boston and get a tetanus shot and the next day, another shot in the arm where they use a gun to punch my arm. The tetanus shot is what is called a ‘helper peptide’ which I believe means that it helps move the vaccine through my system. At another point in the month, I take 280 mg of chemotherapy (by pill) for 5 days, and then I have 3 weeks off. The clinician told me that reasoning behind the timing is that just as the drug is waning in your body, you get another dose. This will go on until the end of March when the clinical trials are done. However, the chemo treatment will likely last until the summer, or 12 months from the start of the therapy.
Regarding being an artist – in the past week I am finally feeling more normal – and have felt little sparks of inspiration. They are fleeting but they are there. A lot of the time during the chemo weeks, I am feeling tired, bored, listless with a sense of malaise. The counelor I saw at the hospital said that this is normal for cancer patients, and it called ‘anhedonia.’
At least there is an explanation for the feeling and that it is common in some cancer patients. I can point to that and say, ‘ok, this is to be expected.’ I was losing faith and thought maybe I would give up on my art, an idea that is totally unreaslistic for me. I’ve decided to try some new techniques in my work and see where that can take me. I’ve needed something to light that spark!