Chapter 9 - Memories of Max

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Home

“Ooh Yes, That’ll surprise her. But you mustn't tell her. It’ll be our secret for when she gets back”.

Max started to draw just after his second diagnosis and this became an important emotional outlet during his treatment. His first picture was of a plane going to ‘Get Well Land’. He told me it was full of TLC. (Tender Loving Care). He had a good eye for proportion and a steady ‘clear’ hand. He used to copy characters from comics and build his own little stories. The drawing required a concentration which took him away from the here and now. It was very therapeutic and he derived enormous satisfaction from his work.

The ‘Army drawings’ were Sara’s idea. She had read about visualisation techniques used to psychologically help put people in the right frame of mind to fight their illness. It requires the patient to consciously envisage the illness and to imagine how their body is overcoming the disease.

There were pictures in the Children’s Unit that tried to explain the role of the various type of blood cells in fighting illness. These pictures showed the red and white cells as friendly smiling rounded blobs and the illness as angry blue angular shapes. As the cartoon strip progressed, the friendly blobs overcome the nasty blue invaders.

We thought that it might help Max if he could express on paper his feelings about his illness. The ‘Army drawings’ were our suggestions for his sketches which would depict armies of blood cells overcoming his cancer. We felt that a positive frame of mind could only be beneficial.

The first step was to get him to agree to do the ‘Army drawings’. It took some time before he actually carried out his promise to do the pictures. He never did the drawings for Sara’s return but the first drawing was presented to us about ten days later.

At the time we were in another hospital because there was no room in the Royal Marsden Hospital. On the curtains were pictures of clowns riding bicycles. As usual, Max started to draw them, as he would draw any comic strip that he saw. He did a brilliant copy across two pages of paper which showed the clowns killing the ‘baddies’ which were shown as grotesque monsters. He later did another drawing of a triumphant Sonic the Hedgehog smashing the monsters into pieces. The monsters had three heads and one leg and were shown bleeding and with very unhappy faces. Sonic had a speech bubble. “I’m your worst nightmare!”.

This was a very graphic and almost disturbing picture were it not for the emphatic positive statement that was being made.

90

Copyright © 2001

Click here if you would like details of how to buy a copy of the book