C Baker: Waiting in illness

It is likely that most of us will encounter illness at some point in our lifetimes or through the lives of those we care about. Cancer patients who undertook the McGill Quality of Life Survey stated that the one thing missing from the survey was a recognition of waiting as a central part of their experience of illness and the conditions under which the waiting took place.1 The waiting often takes place in medical environments that have their own distinct soundscapes and in particular the process of diagnosis is accompanied by unmistakable, unknown sounds that become a central part of a wider dialogue with the experience of illness. The artist’s film central to this paper was developed with patients about their experience of waiting, becoming voiceless in an unfamiliar and manifestly resonant situation punctuated by moments of silence.

A critical part of the development of the work was to find a way to capture the aloneness of waiting embodying the body-environment connection with diagnostic sound, attempting to see inside the body, listening to the invisible with its echoes of consequence. Recordings of MRI: Epi and T2 sequences coupled with the mechanical chirp of the MRI cooler, both delicate and sinister in chorus, plus the sound of submerging into water were captured and composed into an essential sound piece echoing both the process towards medical verdict and the practice of articulating the patients human experience. Our senses are what most intimately connect us to the world around us. Soundscape and moving image coalesce to express the complex lived spatiality of embodiment and the changed character of lived temporality, symbolizing the experience of diagnosis and illness as both a disruption of the lived body and the dysfunction of the biological body explored through the medical-science/art interface.

1. S. Robin Cohen, Balfour M. Mount, Jon J.N. Tomas and Lauren F. Mount, “Existential Well-Being Is an Important Determinant of Quality of Life: Evidence form the McGill Quality of Life Questionnaire,” Cancer, 77: 576–586 pp.