Bridging the Great Divide

It was time to choose the picture.

Facebook has been rolling out its new Timeline format for a quite a while. Two days ago, I decided to take the plunge and create my new page. Ah, but what picture should I choose?  I settled on the live conference painting: Bridging the Great Divide from Health 2.0 October 2010 in San Francisco hosted by Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya. 

Upon posting the painting as the “cover” of my page, friends asked to see the explanation of the piece. To my dismay there wasn't a post. Health 2.0 had been hosting a video of my explanation on their site but it was no longer available. It was time to explain Bridging the Great Divide.


(***Thankfully soon after posting this Ramin Bastani came to the rescue.*** 
He uploaded his I-phone recording of the speech in its entirety.  Thank you so much Ramin!!!! So I am inserting the speech into the blog.)

(The speech is transcribed below, the blog explanation is in smal type font.)


"I love Health2.0.  I just love it.  I mean you should clap for yourselves; you are amazing. I go to a lot of medical conferences; I go to a lot of patient centered conferences. I go to a lot of government conferences, I testify, but what I love about Health 2.0 is you folks don’t sit down.  You stand back there constantly researching and tweeting, talking and kibitzing and trying to figure out how to make data work and it is beautiful. That is what innovation is all about.  You refuse to sit still.  It is astounding and it is beautiful.  When Health 2.0 Goes to Washington happened I was amazed. You could tell the gov. folks opposed to the Health 2.0 folks because the people seated in the plush seats oftentimes were governmental. So you are a very amazing crowd.
I have been listening to you for three days and as I have listened to you I created a painting.  That painting is called “Bridging the Great Divide. “ Because a lot of what we are talking about is how do we communicate? How do we bridge communities?  How do we take left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking and combine them? 


So as you look at the piece you will actually see there are two brains.  We have our right brain our very emotional, creative and artistic side.  And that brain is basically a tree of knowledge.  The tree of knowledge has an apple and that apple also is an eye, because knowledge must have vision.  It doesn’t go anywhere if you cannot see what you are supposed to be doing."

(The left side offers a vignette story of Diem Brown and her company MedGift.  Diem was one of the presenters that week and I painted her sadness. Diem was only 23 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She found herself adrift with no one to ask for help. Wedding announcements and baby shower invitations from here friends were arriving in the mail, while Diem was struggling to pay for chemotherapy wigs and to arrange drivers to her various medical appointments. She thought, “Why is this so hard? Why isn’t there a registry for cancer sufferers like those that exist for brides?” Due to Diem’s valiant effort such registry now exists, and it is called MedGift.)

And then I don’t know if anybody heard the presentation about creating a cancer gift registry.  It was an incredibly powerful concept.  Which is take the most wonderful day in your life: the day you got married, that day you were in that bridal gown and it was so beautiful and combine that with day you found out you had cancer, and your hair was falling out and you cannot pay your medical bills.  How do you get people to help you?  That’s brilliant; let’s create a gift registry for those people, because those people need those gifts so very, very badly.  They need so much help.  So I combined it into a painting.  (Applause) Yes, isn’t it beautiful and tragic?

So if you look at this we also have the coyote.   As Jeff Goldsmith started this whole thing saying his animal spirit is the coyote, but I put it in sheep’s clothing.  Because you do not look at Jeff and think initially he is as powerful as he is.  But then it is like, “Wow, this man is disruptive.”  And you know, that is the kind of inside disruptive that changes things.

Then as you look at this there is a classic radio tower putting out waves and waves of data, beautiful circular waves of data that are going everywhere.  It encompasses all of us.  Also this looks like starry night, this looks The Scream –I got a lot of that.  It also addresses mental illness because under the under current of a lot of these conversations was that people are sad they are not taking their drugs, they are not compliant, they are depressed and how are we addressing mental illness within data access?

As we look at our bridge and it is San Francisco, the beautiful bridge, you know bridging areas bridging geographic regions.  So we have actually all those wonderful dates that we were talking about.  When was the CAT scan developed?  When was the MRI? When was the x-ray developed?  When was Gorilla Glass developed?  Do you know what Gorilla Glass is?  That is the covering tiny micro-thin glass on your droid and it might be on your I-pad they are not going to tell us. It was sitting in a vault in Corning Ware since 1962 waiting for technology to catch up.  And that is what you guys are doing right now.  You’re the catch up.  All of these amazing things are out there that you need embrace and teach us how to use correctly. 

So we have a little baby and you know what that baby is doing?  That baby is crossing what is called the visual cliff.  Can you walk on glass?  Can you take a step forward when you don’t know what is supporting you?  Do you have faith in the technology that you are speaking about even if you cannot see it nor prove it nor say that it is currently effective?  Can you convince others about how it is going to change absolutely everything? 

(Thanks to Derek Wade for his post “When Promoting Transformative Change, Have Faith in Your Convictions”  Prior to Ramin's upload of footage, Derek' quotes pertaining to this sectiion were the only remaining elements of the speech.)

     

So this mobile device has sacrificed its glass so a baby can cross, but it is still doing its job.  It is going downward.  It’s letting go of its circuit board and it is becoming a life raft for all us that at home online, researching trying to get help for our diseases.  That mobile device, mobile technology is going to change everything because those of us who are swimming in waters that we don’t know how to get out of, it’s saving us.  Those people in our society that are the most underprivileged, inaccessible to care, you know what they have?  They have a cell phone, and they are texting and you can reach them.  You can communicate with them, and bring them to be part of this and get rid of this great divide.  

Then as we go deeper in, does anyone have arachnophobia: fear of spiders?  Okay, there is a spider motif within this painting.   As you notice the bridge becomes a web, over here we have a black widow concept.  The black widow is a web spider; she waits for her prey.  She waits for it to come and for many, many years that is why we called it the web.  It just sits there, it does not go out and find people, and we just wait for them to find us.  We have to change that.  That is part of what innovation is.

Over here we have a gentle man who is actually a brown recluse.   They are called fiddle backs.  They are hunter spiders.  You don’t hear them coming and they are coming, and they are going to get you if you do not watch out.  One of the things is watch out.  Things are changing; embrace the innovation that is coming.

But also we heard some amazing things about sex in the last couple of days.  So we have our qupid.me device and a beautiful woman without a face.  Showing you what he has for you.  And that is a lot of what we do with those mobile apps.  How can we communicate, how can we bring her into this communication.

(The babe is trying to reach for a beautiful woman without a face. She in part represents the story that Ramin Bastani founder of Qpid.me told at the event. He was part of the unmentionables session. His service provides texts detailing a list of current STD’s or the lack thereof within a 12 month window. He called it with boyish good humor "a modern, flirtatious, I'll show you mine, if you show me yours."  She beckons with her heart in her hand as if to say: “Here know all there is to know of me and see if you love me still.”) 

As we go deeper in, I heard a lot about privacy. So I have this apple peeling around Deborah Peel.  And she has got a statue of Liberty and it is off it is smoking.  The light is dead.  And she is holding a lock instead of a book.  That is what privacy is about; it is about closing down information and making it not accessible to us. 

(Deborah Peel symbolizes the many conversations about the importance of privacy in health. But privacy over knowledge is not desired by all. Many of us want know about our health and share that information with others. )




Then we have a brain on the other side, the analytical side.  I have been hearing a lot of ROI, ROI… You know it is more than that.  Return on Investment is a nice thing, yes, but we are talking about saving people’s lives.  I heard a decent amount about pills too, about pharma.  And how are we going to make sure people are medically compliant and take their drugs.


I do want you to look at this there is not a hell of a lot about medicine in this painting.  And there is not a lot about patients.  There was a lot of talk about innovation and data and access, but we are not necessarily talking about where that is taking us and how are we going to help people.  I want you to think about that really strongly.  

Because the reason we are doing all of this is to help those patients, to help those people, to make this time in their lives that is absolutely the absolute worst time in their lives better.

(This painting was purchased by Ron Gutman founder and CEO of Health Tap during the auction at the Health 2.0 event in October 2010 and post about it can be viewed on their site called Bridging the Great Divide. The post explains the intent of the piece that we must bridge the right and left brain thought.  We must use the tools of technology to save lives.   I hope every day he and his team are inspired by it upon their wall as I will be inspired viewing it on mine.)

The Palliative Effect of Hair Styling

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Originally uploaded by health2con

I recently attended the Kaiser Permanente Executive Leadership Conference in Washington, DC. KP leaders gathered from all over the US for this event. At the opening of the meeting, KP showed a compilation of several videos to present my art advocacy mission supporting patient access to the medical record and the painting 73 Cents. It was a very powerful video, and after watching it, several members of the audience came up to talk to me about … my hair color.


I am one those people blessed to have been every hair color. I was born with a thick head of black hair. In a month or so, it fell out and came in blond. As I grew, my hair turned red and was that color for many years. By the age of 8, my hair was light brown. In my teens, my hair turned to a dark brown. With having such an amazing array of colors in my youth, I found I didn’t feel constrained to any one color, and in my twenties, I decided to lighten my hair back to the red of my childhood. When Fred grew ill, I was still the light red I had been for many years. After Fred died and I began my painting advocacy, I continued to keep my hair a light red. While working on 73 Cents, I spent days painting in the bright sun, which bleached my hair even lighter.

As the months of painting and grief progressed, I looked at my roots coming in completely gray. I now could truly say I had had every color of hair. But I am only 38 and do not plan to go gently in that gray night. So I went to a local salon for a color consultation. The nice stylists there told me I should go darker as it would look nicer with my complexion.

I submitted to their excellent advice. While I sat in the chair, I spoke to the stylist about hair and cancer. I told her about my husband’s 10-week hospitalization. After about six weeks, his hair had grown so long. We inquired about barber services. The hospital informed us there was a nice lady who performed haircuts for patients. She was very nice, but she did not have a lot of skill with cutting the hair of a bedridden patient. The entire experience turned into a farce that Fred, his folks, and I shared with friends for weeks to come.

After I shared my story with my hairdresser, she told me a tale of her own. She told me how she was the last one to shampoo and style her mom’s hair while her mother was in home hospice. It was a beautiful tale. It made me want to cry. I could almost see her hands gently washing her mother's hair. I could hear the happiness and sorrow she felt in her attempt to help her mother. Yes, she made her mother feel pretty; but this offered more than that. She touched her mother. She caressed her at a point in her life when she so need to be touched. She anointed her hair with oil…

So I am not bothered that the most asked question after viewing a video of 73 Cents was about my hair. I know often when we talk of hair, we might also be talking about beauty and death. Perhaps I have gone darker … because I have gone darker. Like Dark Willow or Dark Phoenix, I am not the same as when I started.


I brought two portfolios with me to the KP conference. One is light and cheery; it is my "before" album. For so many people ask if I was always an artist; I have always been an artist. I used to paint book characters and children's bedroom murals. The before portfolio shows the work I have done with children for the past eight years. The "after" portfolio is for the Medical Advocacy Mural Project. It is filled with images that often disturb but still retain hope. I like to create images that make you think, even if they tend to cause upset. This portfolio is darker, but there are still windows of light. This portfolio contains medical murals, jackets with patient images, and canvases I paint on-site at conferences.

Recently at Health 2.0 in San Francisco, I met a very beautiful woman named Diem Brown, and I painted her sadness. Diem was only 23 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She found herself adrift with no one to ask for help. Wedding and baby shower invitations were arriving in the mail while Diem was struggling to pay for chemotherapy wigs and to arrange drivers to her various medical appointments. She thought, “Why is this so hard? Why isn’t there a registry for cancer sufferers like those that exist for brides?” Due to Diem’s valiant effort such registry exists now, and it is called MedGift. Her story touched me so that I painted it into the Health 2.0 painting Bridging the Great Divide.

In this part of that painting, the bride is combined with the cancer patient. The best point in her life is combined with the worst. The sorrow is palpable. The cancer bride's hair is falling out, and strands are held in her hand. She is reaching for the apple of knowledge. In that apple is placed an eye. Knowledge without vision helps no one.


Weeks after I painted this, I was sent the wedding photos of Katie Kirkpatrick. If you have never seen these photos, I recommend you take a moment to view them. Katie was suffering from end stage cancer when she married her high school sweetheart. Under her lovely gown her limbs were swelling as her organs began to shut down. Just glancing at the photos made me cry, as I saw a body so similar to Fred’s before his death. She was dying and she was beautiful and … her hair was so pretty. She died five days after her wedding.


Thank you, Diem, for sharing your vision with us all. I am sure there are many people who will thank you for creating MedGift to help them when things seem their worst. Thank you, Katie, for sharing photos of your happiest day while so sick; we shall never forget you.

And thanks to the folks at the Kaiser Permantente who were brave enough to invite a cancer widow to an executive conference to remind us ...we are all patients in the end.