WHAT LIES BENEATH | Sapana Adhikari
©What Lies Beneath by Sapana Adhikari. Spring 2020 Intima.: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
“Today, people live in a constant state of anguish about their health. They wonder about every ache and every pain. Is it cancer? A blood clot? An infection? The painting depicts three stoic women, all with various ailments that lie just underneath the surface. The woman to the left holds her pill bottle tightly. She believes it will protect her from illness. Yet, she has so many ailments just underneath the surface: ovarian cancer, sarcoma, claudication, septic joint. The other two women also have various ailments: blood clot, breast cancer, thyroid disease. They all pose together, anxiously, with the fear of not knowing exactly what lies beneath.”
Sapana Adhikari, MD is a practicing Emergency Medicine physician in Charlotte, NC. Her artistic goal is to document the human experience from her unique perspective, as a physician. Adhikari wants her viewers to get a glimpse into her world, her thoughts and her opinions, relating to health, disease and the human body. She hopes to share the beauty of the emotional highs and devastating lows that make up the human experience and share her small contribution to it. Her artwork has been shown in The National Academy of Medicine permanent online gallery, the Frederic Jameson Gallery at Duke University, in a previous Intima issue and several private collections. She has also donated her art to the charity Musa Masala, to raise money for the Wongchu Sherpa Memorial hospital near Everest base camp.