When she was seven years old, artist Lindsay Obermeyer almost died. She had stomach cramps for a month, and then her godmother noticed a lump on her back. The next day an aunt became concerned because Obermeyer wasn’t eating. She was taken to the hospital and, after a series of tests, the lump was diagnosed as Wilms’ tumor–kidney cancer.
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Obermeyer, now 29, miraculously beat the odds, but also speaks of how damaging doctors’–and society’s–responses to illness can be. She remembers liking some of her doctors–the ones who listened, answered her questions, let her watch what they were doing–but others, she recalls, showed an extreme lack of sensitivity. One doctor always “pushed me down by my shoulders to lay me down while he gave me my injection. I said, ‘I’d like to see what you’re doing,’ and he kept pushing me down.” Another night an IV tube slipped and she woke up in the middle of the night to find her hand completely swollen. Later a doctor told her that if the nurse hadn’t acted quickly her hand would have had to have been amputated. Being told this at seven–“when your hand is in extreme pain and you’re freaked out because it’s your hand that you use to draw with, and you’ve just been spending your free time in the hospital coloring and you can’t color anymore because you can’t hold a pen”–only amplified her fears.
These reactions made her feel abnormal, though she now can see that her body was responding naturally to a serious illness. “There is no normal,” she says. “That is one falsehood of medicine. As they try to generate statistics on how the body works, there’s always this last 1 percent that they forget.” Obermeyer still receives form letters from a group studying Wilms’ patients, “asking me is my penis size normal, or do I have a normal breast size, are my periods normal.” These letters address her only by patient number. “I would like to be respected for who I am; I’m not a statistic.” Throughout her childhood, “I was being negated of my humanness–being reduced to a kidney, or the lack of a kidney.”
Areas of the pillowcase in Remembrance are stained with blood. “An IV solution or something has dropped on it because you can see where salt has stopped the blood from staining the linen,” she says. She’s outlined the blood with red stitching. “I was trying to pull back what they tried to wash out by tracing around the edges of it.” In Sight Unseen a tiny snapshot of her is surrounded by brightly colored red and blue beads in a pattern taken from pictures of cell structures. “Most people notice the beads first. People are noticing cells, and that’s what the doctors notice first; that’s how you’re reduced to something very small.”
