Anatomy and Art

Well, I’m one week in to the Dallas portion of my clinical practicum and so far so good.  I love seeing how different people work.  Everyone has their own ways.  Everyone has experienced different types of cases.  And yet certain practices and materials pop up everywhere.

So far I am finding that there is great room for individuality in the practice of anaplastology.  It’s really about problem solving, and there are usually many ways to solve a problem.  To me, I feel that much of my training revolves around a better understanding of the materials at hand, being exposed to different types of solutions, learning what goes with what, and most importantly, the safety considerations necessary since we are dealing with patients and not just our own projects.

I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to take in wisdom from such a variety of sources.  Between the split internship between Chicago and Dallas in the first place, and now getting to intern with a private practice along side weekly observation of another university/hospital setting, I feel like I am getting a well rounded view of how this field comes together.

By the way, here is the drive I made last weekend…

And in just a couple weeks I’ll be flying down and across the gulf to Sarasota, Florida, for the annual meeting of the International Anaplastology Association, where I will get to meet even more professionals and widen my view that much further.  I’m looking forward to it.

Well, first things first, I’m in Dallas!  It was a long drive down, but a good one I’d say.  As is typical for me on long drives, my brain got to bubbling over as the miles passed by, and this particular drive I found myself thinking about an undeniable difference between medicine and art.

Somewhere barreling south on I-55 through Illinois with Johnny Cash singing about how he’s gonna break his rusty cage and run, I got to thinking about how art is so largely about putting our humanity on display, about letting people see more of ourselves.  But medicine, while it does explore the inner workings of humans, seems to minimize expressions of humanity on the part of medical professionals.  They are expected rather, to be above humanity, behind the white lab coat, infallible.

I don’t believe I’d ever quite recognized that juxtaposition before.  And it is one that I think I’ve been feeling for a while now, just without really recognizing what it is.

Anyway, this traveler has arrived, and just this morning I began my anaplastology internship in Dallas.  More on that to come, but so far so good.  I’ve also got my big computer set up out here, so expect more posts on animation as well.  The sun is shining and old friends have been so kind as to take me in for my time out here.

It’s good being in Texas again.

Ok, my clothes are packed, and I’m about to unplug this computer and set it aside with the various hard drives and cables needed to make this journey happen.  And, just this morning I dropped off six paintings with a woman out here, Elysia Lock, who runs the We Burn: Chicago art showings.  So even though I’ll be gone, I’ll still have some work in the show.  I decided to go with the following collection for this show…

Fire Walk

Tom Tips His Hat

Swirl
(the painting that is somewhat responsible for my journey to Chicago in the first place)

Blue Man

&, Phoenix Rising

I’m excited that my work will be up and being seen even if I can’t be there myself.  I have been really wanting to paint lately, and positively swamped for time.  Speaking of which, I’d better get a move on, if I’m going to finish packing up tonight as planned.  This is officially my last Chicago post for a little while.

I am so touched.  My friend Jasmine threw me a going away party last weekend to send me off properly to Texas for the 2nd half of my semester. She decided to give the party a medical theme, and also a limb theme, in homage to the work I am doing here in Chicago, and will be doing in Texas very soon.  Many of the friends that I have made in Chicago came out, and several of them dressed in lab coats or a few of them in full on medical attire.  I don’t know the last time I’ve ever had so much effort made on my behalf like that.  I am truly flattered.

And I am happy to share a photograph of my favorite visual moment of the evening.  Martin arrived in nearly full on OR regalia.  Sometime after his arrival, the game Operation came out.  They’ve changed the game a bit since we were all kids, so the directions were pulled out and a moment was taken to assess the situation.  So I walked up to see Martin, all dressed the part, holding the direction pamphlet just like we used to hold the gross anatomy lab manual, and about three or four people waiting around the “patient” for the surgeon to give instructions.  Oh, and it doesn’t hurt the moment at all that Jasmine is still wearing her extra googly eyes from earlier silliness along with her lab coat and stethoscope.

Add to that an assortment of doll parts, extra eyes (styrofoam balls) hanging from the chandelier, Play-doh set out for people to play around and do some sculpting, and a version of the old pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game that featured Van Gogh’s famous self portrait from after he cut his ear alongside an assortment of magazine cut out ears for pinning.

I am truly impressed.  What a great send off 🙂

Check out that inferior alveolar nerve! So this is something that I’ve been working on these past couple weeks.  First it was getting the braces modeled and aligned.  And then most recently, it’s been the nerve.

The race is on to get this animation on track.  My time gets so divided between my work with this and my time at the clinic that it gets down right overwhelming at times.  Right now, I’m doing what I can to have everything modeled and all my shots planned out and ready for render once I get to Texas.  I hit the road in a week, so the countdown is on.  Then I’ll be working with two clinics in Dallas while I complete the rendering and final stages of my animation, and write my final paper in preparation for my defense for graduation.

Earlier this week I wrapped up my side job, so at least that’s out of the way.  It was actually really refreshing work.  I was digitizing some old vhs tapes for a woman who had documented cases of thalidimide related birth defects back in the 80s.  It was nostalgic for me, going through video footage like that and talking someone through the possibilities of what could be done.  Plus it’s reassuring getting my old tricks figured out on the new machine.  I can happily report that I am still video capable over here.

This week will be my last chance for any in person questions I may have about my project research before I go.  And at the clinic I will be wrapping things up with the patients I have been seeing, and also with the new bench assignment I’ve been doing, making a finger prosthesis that matches me.

It’s a lot to get done!  And I still have to pack!  Eek!

What a delightful find tonight…

This and other such pieces can be found on the Vanitas, blog site of Fernando Vicente.
http://fernandovicentevanitas.blogspot.com/

Looks like he also has his own website.
http://www.fernandovicente.es/

My Spanish is pretty shaky, but he appears to be a well published painter, specializing in pin ups and political satire as well as the medical paintings I first saw on his blog.  He was born in Madrid, and he began his career in the 80s combining painting with illustration.

These are fantastic!

Lately, between seeing patients at the clinic, I’ve been learning a bit about somato prostheses, specifically what goes into taking impressions of hands and fingers and building a prosthesis from there.  I’ve really only been through the impression taking process so far.  We did that with algenate, much like you would an ear or a nose.  Getting an entire hand out is difficult and takes some finagling, but I did it.  I was then able to mix up and pour yellow dental stone into the algenate impression.  Slowly I peeled away the algenate to reveal the stone cast created in the process.  I have to say that all those years of being a picky eater as a child have served me well in my recent years.  Between anatomical dissections, and delicate separations of materials for my anaplastology classes, it’s a fine trick, being able to precisely remove one thing from another.

Once all of the algenate was picked away, we made a few adjustments to the cast to clean it up and make it non-stick, and from this process, I now have my very own replica of my right hand.

Since then I’ve repeated the process for just two fingers, and I now have copies of my first two fingers of each hand, also in stone.  The next step in this bench exercise is to amputate one of the stone fingers (which as it turns out is a little bit scary to think about even though it’s just in stone).  And from there I will learn about the sculpture and silicone creation process of making a finger prosthesis.

From what I’ve read, such prostheses help people hold a pen or pencil, type, play an instrument, any number of things, as well as maintain a more normal appearance.  I look forward to working with these types of patients in the months to come.

Last night I stumbled into this image while I was looking for something else.  It was listed with other pieces created in Maya.  I love it.  I wish I had an artist to link to in credit of it.  If anyone knows who created this, let me know and I will happily edit this post to include that information.

I remember back in gross anatomy, my first dissections of heads, and how strange a perspective it was on the tongue in particular when you see it in it’s full form.  This image doesn’t fully display the tongue to the level of bulk I once found shocking (we seriously have a lot of tongue in us!), but it is a very nicely created image.  I think I’m most impressed by the faint suggestion of the man’s closed eye, that might also be the semilunar hiatus.  That’s just a nice touch, that.

Here is an old image out of Grey’s Anatomy if you’re not familiar with what I mean (this is also the image that Wikipedia gives you if you follow that semilunar hiatus link.)

I don’t know whether to be angry about this, because my student edition software certainly wasn’t free, or happy at the idea of being able to get this software on others’ computers, like when I’m in Texas and I’ll be literally driving over the only computer I have licensed with such software without knowing another soul out that way who has it should anything happen to this machine.  Regardless, it’s certainly worth shining a light on…

Free Autodesk software to students and faculty.  It’s a three year license, so you can’t count on using it forever, but three years isn’t bad at all.

http://students.autodesk.com/

The City of Chicago is buried under blankets upon blankets of snow.  And I am taking the day to work on my animation project.  I have literally been working on getting this skull in proper shape for months now.  And it is sooooo close!

For those of you who do not work in 3D animation programs, this is the kind of screen I have been living with of late…

All that mess, and when you zoom out, it’s just…

I’ve been doing this all the way around the skull, slowly stitching edges together.  And now I’m patching up the parts where the CT scattered due to metal pieces on the plastic skull we placed in there.

It’s been a long process, but I intend to finish this today.  I have a bowl full of braces for modeling next, (yes, my skull is getting braces) and then I can put together an animated storyboard.  I need to ask fast, because the semester is flying by and I intend to present this work for graduation in April along with a paper detailing the process and what I have learned from it.  It never feels like enough time, but I still believe it can be done.

So you just keep on keepin’ on out there, Snowmageddon.  I’ve got plenty to do right here inside.