Pigeons in my Book

There is nothing quite like a little bit of pressure to finish work. I have been working sporadically for two years on my book You Look Great! Making Invisible Disease Visible. Many things got in the way of completing this, both visible and invisible. There was the problem of managing disability itself, with sluggish downtimes and time consuming medical appointments. Then there was the daily distraction of household and property maintenance, as well as my sometimes "real job" of producing art work for galleries that may or may not actually sell it.

The biggest delay in writing my book was the fact that there were two other incomplete books in the pipeline ahead of this one. But those are finished now and I am in the process of sending them out to prospective publishers, getting them back again, and then sending them back out to different places. At my age it is basically a mechanical process.

I actually have two or three other incomplete manuscripts but they will go on the furthest back burner. My incomplete part memoir/part medical adventure/big part illustration text looms over me. This is where applying just a little bit of pressure comes in. A short article for the Mayo Clinic will be published this fall. In this article I casually mention my work on You Look Great! Making Invisible Disease Visible. It helps make the goal of finishing this a bit more real.

I have begun setting a bit of time each day to write and work on illustrations. This last one, Piezogenic Pigeons from the chapter "Barrier Beasts." The rocks were drawn mostly from life and on location in Norway. Loved the vacation but allowed a little bit of pressure to intrude in order to bring my book illustration to life.

A Pack of Picky Pinky Panthers

I am back at work illustrating the chapter “Barrier Beasts” for my book “You Look Great! Making Invisible Disease Visible.”  This chapter is a satirical look at the intimidating barriers patients sometimes face in determining diagnoses of illnesses that have no one specific physiological marker, but require an accumulation of several physical manifestations that can be added up and tabulated for a definitive “score.”  This can be seen in such illnesses as Ehlers-Danlos, which a revised nosology added, at least on the Beighton scale, more stringent conditions for diagnosis.  For example, patients could be granted a point on the scale in flexibility for the pinky finger’s ability to bend up to or beyond 90 degrees.  This was changed slightly to read only “Beyond 90 degrees,” the cut off barrier to diagnosis moved just slightly higher. 
My satirical drawing and rhyme for this is called “A Pack of Picky Pinky Panthers.”  The rich background of this drawing is derived from the landscape of Norway, where I am at present.

A Pack of Picky Pinky Panthers

You can raise your pinky to ninety degrees
But you’ve only just begun
To unlock our gates of entry, please
bend little finger to ninety plus one

We have changed our minds, that won’t quite do
Little finger must bend more
It must bend to ninety degrees plus two
Don’t complain it makes you sore

That still does not look right to us
More points you must accrue
Pinky must bend back ninety-nine degrees plus
Or we’ll turn you in to glue

With your palm flat upon a table
bend pinky up to three o’clock
Then we’ll see if you are able
at the same time to lift a rock

Don’t cry and call us panthers mean
We only must be sure
Your pinky should bend to three fifteen
Or we will not allow you through our door