My father died of cancer in November. After the funeral, the paperwork, the strange silence that follows all of that, my doctor was a bit concerned. There had never been a serious illness in my family before, no cancer, no heart attacks, no leukaemia, and then my dad had cancer. So he sent me for a CT scan of my pancreas.
There was a second reason too. I officially have diabetes, though I don’t take medication and my HbA1C is well within the normal range. The right diet is the key. An echography when I was first diagnosed hadn’t turned up anything unusual, but a CT is more precise. Worth a proper look.
The experience itself was a little anticlimactic, if I’m honest. You slide in and out of the machine, hold your breath on cue, and that’s more or less it. I’d half-braced for some reaction to the iodine, since my father was allergic to it (but then he was allergic to everything, including himself), but nothing happened. Not a single side effect. No drama. Just a quiet Friday afternoon in a radiology department.
And then the nurse showed me the pictures, and I forgot all about the anti-climax.
I don’t understand how anyone looks at a cross-section of their own body and feels nothing. There it all was, organs I’d only ever encountered in textbooks, laid out in greyscale like some impossible map. And they were mine, not an abstract photo. You’ve been living inside this thing your whole life without ever having seen it from the outside, or from any angle at all really, and suddenly there it is. I found it completely gripping.
When I was a teenager, I had to choose between studying medicine, with an eye towards a PhD in genetics, or computing, with a view to do research in that field. Both were my absolute favourite things. I agonised over it, got accepted to both, and then at the last minute went for computing. Partly because I felt I had a stronger foundation there, partly because I thought it would give me a clearer advantage. It did. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a me doing genetics research (I totally would have sold a kidney to be involved in the mRNA research into covid vaccination).
But biology never quite let me go. During my PhD I worked closely with biologists as an applied domain for my research (I was at one of the first CRISPR talks where most people, including me, didn’t grasp the significance of the discovery), and I flirted with the field the whole time. When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I also decided to go back to my biology interest and read everything published on and near the subject in medical journals over the last 20 years, then created an action plan. The road not taken has a way of resurfacing at odd moments. It came back to me lying still inside that scanner, thinking about my father, thinking about genetics, wanting to ask the technician how the machine actually worked.
That curiosity is the closest I get to the version of myself that chose medicine. Asking too many questions during consultations. Finding a technician willing to geek out for a few minutes. Staring at images of my own pancreas and wanting to understand every shadow in the picture.
The scan came back clear, by the way. Yay!
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