In my professional role as a medical illustrator, I'm often drawn to a good metaphor. As a patient, the allure of metaphor can be dangerous.
Mesa Schumacher is an award-winning scientific and medical illustrator with an MFA from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Learn more about her work on X and Instagram @mesabree and mesaschumacher.com
In her essay “Amazonia” (Spring 2022 Intima), Dena Brownstein writes about her transformative experience as a physician-turned-cancer patient. "I was an Amazon, but I did not feel like a warrior," she reflects, referencing the Ancient Greek female warriors whom a historian mistakenly posited gained the name a-mazos from a practice of amputating their breasts.
Brownstein rejects the notion that illness, especially cancer, can be literarized as a hero's journey. Instead, she struggles with fatigue and disconnection, focuses on retaining routine, and gives in to anger and frustration over the trials of obtaining and receiving care.
Patients are not characters, and the plot arcs in medicine are not always redemptive. I examine a similar metaphoric trap in my studio art comic “Illustrating BRCA1” (Fall 2024 Intima). Doctors often embody the active role in the narrative of care—the doer, the leader—while patients, consenting or not, take on the passive role of the done-to.
As a BRCA1 patient, I’ve leaned on my professional identity to soften the powerlessness of choosing between burdensome screening, living with high cancer risk, or undergoing prophylactic amputations. By responding visually to my opponent, I attempt to reclaim control when it feels absent.
Brownstein describes similar refuge in her professional identity, using her doctor identity to distance herself from the role of patient, even as she booked appointments and demanded to read her own test results, perfectly described as she writes "I changed out of the flimsy paper exam gown and back into my identity as a doctor."
So far, my narrative arc is better than many. If I do someday develop cancer, I know it won’t be a metaphor for my morality, actions, or strength, though I know even after purposeful rejection of these ideas, I may be tempted to resort to over-simplified narrative.
Reading Brownstein’s essay, I found meaning in the smaller lessons she identifies: accepting kindness without reciprocity, developing a deeper understanding of the very different perspectives of doctor and patient, a gap that is not always bridgeable.
If illness offers any valuable lesson, it’s this: empathy for others' experiences and resistance to distill people into reductive roles. We are not just doctors, artists, or patients—these are only roles we play.
Mesa Schumacher is an award-winning scientific and medical illustrator with an MFA from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her illustration and infographic work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, zoos, aquariums, museums, science games and academic publications. She is working on a graphic novel about life with a mutant BRCA1 "breast cancer" gene. Portions of this comic are excerpts from a graphic novel in progress about her life with a mutant BRCA1 gene. Learn more about her work on X and Instagram @mesabree and mesaschumacher.com