Pictures of health

Students' positive artwork now greets patients at Saint John's Cancer Center

By Rodney Richey, Herald Bulletin Feature Writer

ANDERSON — When one local art teacher asked her students to create visual images for patients at a cancer center, the result could be summed up in one word: hope.

“It’s interesting to see through their eyes what it might mean to be battling something,” said Dr. Darrel Ross, clinical director of the Saint John’s Cancer Center. It was Ross’ idea to commission the artwork.

“Part of this was, when the patients come in from check-in to the treatment, there is a long hallway that they walk down,” Ross said. “And we really didn’t have anything on the walls. So I thought, ‘How could you make this hallway an inspiration?’”

Nancy Hunt, registrar of the center, reached out to the school system to recruit an educator who might know something about the disease. Through the East Side Middle School librarian, Susan Frossard, who had been a patient at the center, Hunt found Ellen Vores, East Side Middle School art teacher.

In 2006, Vores’ husband, Terry, died after a brief battle with esophageal cancer. Still in latter stages of grief, Vores nevertheless went to her students with the proposal.

“I shared my story with them and asked them, before we did this assignment, if they would like to do this,” Vores said. “They were incredibly enthusiastic about it.”

Vores gave her students choices of materials and artistic styles, but only after they did an exercise to discover their own feelings.

Not only did some students share their own stories of family members and friends who fought the disease, but all of them pondered words about cancer.

“We started with a session about what were the bad words that had to do with cancer,” Vores said. “They came up with ‘losing your hair’ and ‘chemotherapy’ and ‘being sick.’

“And then they came up with good words, and that was their motivation. Everything they did was their own personal idea.”

The results were striking, according to Sandy Crawley, director of clinical research for the center.

“I was extremely touched,” Crawley said. “I have seen kids do things for a hospital now and again. But to actually reach out with the message that these kids had put in their artwork, almost all of them had the message of hope. And working with cancer patients, that’s the one thing we always tell them they have: hope. And nobody can take that away from them.”

Before the pictures were hung on the center’s walls last week, Ross solicited opinions from his patients.

“The feeling I got from most of the people is that they’re pretty overwhelmed,” Ross said, “that kids at this grade level, at this age, would actually take time out to draw such pictures.”

Ross, once a resident at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., treated children with cancer and found out something interesting.

“The kids that I would take care of, they had a greater sense of invincibility,” he said. “They were more motivated to enjoy life in the moment.

“They view (cancer) as something that they are dealing with, but they’re not going to let it control them.”

For Vores, the emotional impact was twice as powerful, especially when she and librarian Frossard first went over the finished artwork. A few tears were reportedly shed.

“Oh, there were a lot,” Vores said. “I remember taking them down to the library and sitting with her, with a tissue, because they were all so special.

“I was so touched by the kids’ depth of love and understanding and, I thought, wisdom way beyond their years.”



Contact Rodney Richey: 640-4861, rodney.richey @heraldbulletin.com.

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