A Sympathetic Drawing for Dysautonomia

The drawing "Dysautonomia" was recently reworked. Dysautonomia refers to a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, a division of the peripheral nervous system. The drawing is part of a series for an illustrated book, Making Invisible Disease Visible. What is being made visible in "Dysautonomia" are sensations likely to be experienced when the system that regulates heart rate, respiration, sweating, blood pressure and possibly reflexes, runs amok.

In my initial drawing, the pots of coffee were connected by intravenous to the arms of the figure. During days when my own dysautonomia was marked I once described it as feeling as though I had just received 50 cups of coffee via intravenous. Nerves tend to feel "prickly" and sometimes quite painful. Other patients have noted an over-reaction to every day stimuli. One patient even described choking, gagging, then vomiting in response to simply brushing his teeth. Yikes!

In order to depict this nervous system on edge, I began to draw a face on the male figure’s torso. This was my sympathetic response (pun intended) to the story of the teeth brushing debacle. To many patients, it can sometimes seem as if the entire body becomes a sensory organ; seeing, hearing, tasting, responding too much.

The still life in front of the figure denotes the three divisions of the autonomic nervous system; enteric, parasympathetic and sympathetic. While revising this drawing, I decided to write an ancient Chinese poem from the Book of Songs on to one of the bottles. It is a very sympathetic poem:

Don’t push a cart you stand behind

The dust will rise and cloud your view

Don’t dwell on the one hundred troubles of your mind

Or you will never see them true

Dysautonomia is a disease of the nervous system and not of the mind, so this poem could be misleading. I just happened to like the script.