David Plough
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Collaborative Conversations. As always, I'm your host, Dave Plow. And those of you watching have probably already noticed. But those of you listening might not have noticed yet. Things are a little bit different today. One I'm recording in my home studio. You can see there's not the whiteboard behind me. Things are a little bit looser, a little bit different here. And number two, I'm not joined by my typical co-host, doctor Barbara Maxwell. And there's a good reason for that. today's episode was not initially planned to be a part of this season. today is the first of 3 or 4 unexpected welcome bonus season two episodes. And this one takes place between my esteemed colleague, Doctor Maxwell, and someone you might remember from earlier in the season, back when we were centering on the patient voice. We brought in Ted Meyer to interview Rick Phillips. Now, Rick Phillips acts as the patient voice in our department. Ted Meyer, if you'll remember, is an artist. He's also involved with the USC Keck School of Medicine. And Ted has a fascinating story. He grew up with a genetic disorder called Gaucher disease. And throughout treatment, throughout his entire life, he has been involved in the health care system. And he has a very unique perspective on what it's like to be a patient. And when Ted was done interviewing Rick we were spending some time chit chatting after the episode ended and Ted said, hey, you know what? I would really like to be a part of this season. Do you think we could make that happen? And I said, you know what, Ted? I'll talk to Barbara and Barbara was very quick to say, yes, I'd love to interview Ted. So that's what you are about to get here today. Now, I do want to give you a little side note. This interview did run well outside of our 2520 to 25 minute rule, but it didn't run out so much that we have two full size episodes. So today's episode is going to be a little bit shorter. Next week's episode is going to be a little bit longer, and that's okay. It's always nice to change things up, to have things be a little bit different. There are a few things that Ted and Barbara are going to mention in this episode that you may not yet have context for. One of the things that we've done is we've recorded a few of Ted's lectures, and those are available on our website at iph. Edu. We actually have two lectures of Ted's available there under our Collaborative Topics section. first one we have is Voices of Healing Scarred for life. And that's a project that gets discussed in depth in this first episode with Ted. Ted and Barbara spend some time talking about the art, how he came up with it, and why he does what he does. You can see a much more in-depth version of that on our website. You can also see the second night that we had Ted in Bloomington, which was Voices of Healing Night two. Don't be Afraid to heal. And that's a panel discussion between Ted, another artist named Dominick, and a doctor that works for Indiana University named Doctor Deborah Rusk. Now, Dominic and Deb have both undergone lung transplants, so it makes for a very interesting discussion because we have a patient, an artist and a doctor, all they're talking about their shared experience. Both of these videos are available on our website and also on our YouTube page. I don't want to take any more of your time with my speaking because really, you're all here to hear from Ted and Barbara. So with that, we will go ahead and throw it to them.

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
so it's always an absolute joy to get a chance to talk with Ted Meyer. Ted, as you know, you and I could talk to the moon and back.

Ted Meyer
Yep. We have

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
And we have. Yeah. And we've always got a lot to share, but today we're going to talk about, the work that you do. And for me, I'd love that we really dive into what it is to really hear the expertise of people who are going through the conditions that those of us on the other side are stepping in in that moment to trade. And, I'm my concern is that, you know, is particularly as we've been doing things with learners that, we're kind of taught to, ask questions in a very diagnostic, clinical way. We're looking for very specific answers. And so we don't really hear the story. We often do not hear the story. And so for me, I'm really interested in the way that you use narrative and storytelling and art to make those stories from people very apparent and front and center. And I'm interested. I am from hey, we on the health care side can get to the point where we listen better and learn from that expertise and hear those stories. So that's kind of what I'm hoping that, you know, our conversation will get us to today. What about you?

Ted Meyer
I'm ready.

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
So tell us a little bit about the work that you do.

Ted Meyer
Well, I am the artist in residence at the School of Medicine. And sometimes I come out there to Indianapolis and do a little work with you guys, too, which is always fun. So what I do is I curate art shows that correspond to the core curriculum of the first and second year students, and my hope is that if doctors up and coming doctors see artwork about illness by patients, they'll have a couple revelations. One is that there people are more than their test results, but the illness can also lead to creativity. It can lead to beautiful artwork or challenging artwork, but artwork that would have never been created had these people been healthy, like they might have done other artwork, they could have done landscapes or gnomes sitting

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
Yeah. So.

Ted Meyer
But as a result of their illness, they're doing artwork that, you know, speaks to their life situation.

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
And this. That. That's kind of. At the heart of all art. Is not that. That's based on an entire experience or, a feeling. And a mode of, you invest your life into it. So it would be very strange if people who had, like, chronic illnesses didn't put that in. There are in some way, shape or form.

Ted Meyer
Well, I think, you know, a lot of people just want pretty or they

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
Yeah.

Ted Meyer
But I but what's interesting about art, about illness, it can be specifically about the illness. I've also had people who do do landscapes and things come to me and say the 20 minutes a day that I am strong enough to hold a paintbrush, even though I have Parkinson's and I paint that landscape, that's my distraction and that

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
Yeah.

Ted Meyer
So that's that's not usually the work I show because I'm trying to tell a story specifically about the lived experience of an illness to the med students. But it is interesting that just the act of doing art gives people a mental break from their illnesses, so they both count. But I only show the one.

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
And so I noticed in your own artwork, and when you've presented to our students and our community here at I, you've, talked about how your work previously looked one way, and then you had a very critical moment in your own life trajectory that shifted your art. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Ted Meyer
So when I was young, I did artwork about my illness. I was I was sick from the time I was a child until I was about 40. I had. And then NIH with American tax dollars. Thank you. All of their watching for that came up with a treatment for what I had. So all of a sudden my pain mostly fatigue. That was the main thing that disappeared. And, and the emotional thought of like, oh, I could die any moment. That stuff all vanished. And with it, my artwork changed because I didn't do artwork about myself anymore. For years, it was artwork about what it was like to be trapped in a body, what it was like to have these thoughts all the time about life expectancy and paying for medical bills and things like that. And then all of a sudden all that was gone. So. So I have this change in my life and I started to tell other people's stories, and I did that through focusing on their scars, how everybody's scars tells a different story of how their life changed. So as I was getting better, I still wanted to hear stories about illness, how people dealt, mostly how they survived because if they're talking to me, they've survived. You know? So I started making prints. So they're scars. But part of that process was sitting for a half hour first. Tell me about your scar. What do you think when you come out of the shower every morning and you see it? So that became, a way for me to sort of get into this whole patient narrative thing. Before I knew patient narrative was the thing like you did, because you had a degree in it. But I was just a patient thinking, oh, these people all have stories to tell, and they're really interesting.

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
That's what the lovely things about the scarred for life project is because you show those two things side by side. You show the left and scar that's been lifted off the person's body, turned into art that reflects their story. And at the same time, their narrative story and their image that them are shown at the same time. So for me, it's a a marvelous, like way of telling a story in different forms because you could very easily showed art itself distance from where it came from. That would be a totally different experience for someone then, seeing the artwork tied to this life of this person and the story that they've shared, that's very personal. I mean, having something lifted off your body as like a scorpion is, is very human and very personal and at the same time to read those stories. I know certainly when I've seen them scarred for life. And when you exhibited it here at IU, that was the commonly stated thing was, oh, this is this person's life. So what made you want to give voice to that person and not just art to that person?

Ted Meyer
you know, scars are really interesting because everybody, like. Like any illness, everybody's hip replacements different. Everyone's heart transplant is different. You know, there's that saying that when you know one person with an illness, you know one person with an illness and scars are really endemic of that. And what's interesting with scars is that everybody knows the day they got the scar, whether it's from a car accident and or cancer or heart transplant or liver transplant. But the healing process afterward is different for everybody. It can take weeks for one person. It can take months or years for another person. The time the doctor tells you you're healed is completely different from when you feel your heal. So. So when you have these critical injuries or life changes, there's no end to it. You know, there's everybody, there's a definite start and there's something about people telling their story. And in my case, what I do is I make money, Prince. I roll income of people and I pull a print off and they have something tangible to say. That's what I went through. And I'm done with it now. And telling the story and making some artwork out of it seems to really help people sort of push them through the healing process, and that's something I didn't expect when I started doing it. I just thought, I'm going to make some sort of abstract art of these squiggles. They do have a story behind them, but I would show them and people reacted so strongly to them they would start crying in my studio telling me their stories. And I realized the impact of these things on people. The ephemera of, you know, these are accidents. So that became just something that I would do. Anybody who comes to me, do a print because I know it will help them,

Dr. Barbara Maxwell
Yeah. Because I get. Scars are scars are things that are hidden often. You know, there's something people don't want to show. So even the act of asking and treating it like something beautiful, you know, that's a complete shift often in how people think about scarring, you know? So I can imagine that. How uplifting and how, like freeing in a way it is to have your look at your scar yourself in a different way because someone has lifted it off your body and turned it into something else. And you told a story. You told your life story about, did something incredibly impactful and meaningful about what shifted in your own life course. At the same time, there are two really powerful things.

Ted Meyer
What's interesting with the Scar project is that there is a number of scar projects, and everybody deals with the scars differently depending on where they're coming from. Like in Los Angeles, there's a project called One and Eight, and it's for women that have had mastectomies, and they shoot these beautiful black and white images of women. And you can see where the mastectomies were, the scars. There's one in Australia that's a big scar project. There's, there's, a woman, in Paris who does the Japanese treatment where she puts gold in in the scars. So everybody deals with them differently, and they're all very valid projects. They all help people heal. But what I wanted to do was some of the projects, you look at the body and you're really focused on the damage to the physical damage to the body, and that really wasn't that important to me. As somebody who was very sick and now is really healthy, there is a whole survival thing that kicks in of redoing your life when things drastically change, even when they change from bad to good, you know? So I wanted to hear how these people rebuilt their life, how they became survivors, the strength they got from going through these things. So when I photograph them, I leave the ink on the body because it kind of just adds this nice colorful stripe on their body. And so you're not focused on, oh, look, look how big that scar is or look, look how damaged the skin looks. It's like more of just a geographic marker of that's the part of the body. And now look at their survival story. Because that's what in my project, that's what's most important. In some of the others, it is the damage to the body.

David Plough
Barbara, Ted, thank you both so much for having this conversation. And ladies and gentlemen, I want to point out there's more. That was part one. It was a short conversation. Part two dives more into the interprofessional collaboration, how Ted helps students, and how the patient's voice is an important part of interprofessional education. So if you want to hear that, which I'm sure you do, you're going to need to stay tuned for next week. Those of you who are just listening to this podcast, great. Bravo! That is the traditional way. to consume a podcast. However, watching the video for this particular episode can add quite a bit As Ted gave us permission to use a number of his paintings from the scarred for life project. so those are in her spliced throughout the podcast, and you get to see some of them. If you want to see more, visit our website under the Collaborative Topics page. And there we've got two videos of the Ted Myers experience. So you'll be able to watch those and get a much deeper understanding of the scarred for life project, and also have a very interesting discussion between Ted Dominic and Deborah Rusk where they talk about just their unique experience in hospitals with doctors as patients, as professionals. I cannot recommend enough that you go and you watch those presentations. Also, if you want to watch more from us or consume more from the IAP center, learn a little bit more about who we are, what we do. You can do so on our website at IPE.IU.EDU, but also through our LinkedIn page. All you do is go to LinkedIn and you type in Indiana University Interprofessional Practice and Education Center. That's a lot to type, but I promise you, at some point before you're done typing up all those characters, our page will pop up. Thank you for listening. And do not miss the second part of this conversation or the upcoming. After this, we still have more bonus episodes of season two of collaborative come recessions. Thank you and we will see you next time.