Michele Angelo Petrone’s paintings of his cancer journey give a clear insight into the uncertainty, isolation and pain experienced by people with cancer. They also show the importance of the support and care which is given to cancer patients.
Michele Petrone demonstrates the power of the arts as a channel for communication. It would be difficult for anyone who sees his work not to be touched by it. I believe that his paintings have a valuable role in educating health professionals and society more widely about the emotional aspects of cancer.
Professor Mike Richards
National Cancer Director
Foreword
Enormous advances have been made in the past decade in the treatment
of cancer. Thanks to earlier detection through screening and better
diagnostic methods, together with an impressive array of different treatments,
more and more people have a realistic chance of cure or at least of
living well and for longer with their disease. Despite this, the word
cancer fills most of us with dread. Survey after survey shows it to
be one of the most feared diseases. Merely facing the knowledge of having
a life threatening disease, let alone dealing with the physical effects
and assaults of treatment, stretches most people to their limits. The
emotional pain of family and friends also can be agony as they struggle
to find ways of helping their suffering loved ones.
The healthcare professionals who witness this physical and emotional
pain on a daily basis may respond in a variety of ways. A few become
so inured to it all that they become indifferent and unmoved, while
others may adopt a cool, professional detachment as their only means
of coping. Some experience considerable psychological difficulties and
emotional burnout themselves and seek solace in dysfunctional and unhelpful
ways.
So cancer potentially affects everyone, the patient, family and friends
and healthcare professionals trying to help. As we have become more
high-tech in our treatments we have sometimes forgotten how to be high-touch
as well. Listening to clinicians discussing cancer at conferences I
sometimes feel that they understand far more about the characteristics
of individual cancer cells than they do about the people unfortunate
enough to harbour them. They know and acknowledge even less about the
psychological costs that cancer and its treatment imposes on us all.
Those of us who work within oncology are sometimes surprisingly inarticulate
at expressing the emotional triumphs and tragedies that will be part
of anyone's cancer journey. As Virginia Woolf once observed in an essay
entitled On being ill, “If someone falls in love then they have
Shakespeare or Keats to speak for them, but let one try to explain pain
and language at once runs dry.”
So to capture what cancer really means to all those affected we need
other modes of expression such as the powerful and deeply moving paintings
by Michele Angelo Petrone. The first time that I heard and saw Michele's
'Emotional Cancer Journey' I was sitting next to a world famous cancer
expert, a man with a reputation for his own brilliant oratory skills,
impressive contributions to cancer research and who could launch quite
vitriolic attacks on other speakers at meetings. He seemed quite agitated
during Michele's talk which both worried and puzzled me until I realised
that he was desperately searching for a handkerchief as he had been
moved to tears.
Michele has found a means of touching us all whatever our connection
with cancer, in a way that graphs and statistics cannot. His own art
and the prose that accompanies it, changes the way people feel and view
the disease. Self-awareness is part of the process of coping with cancer.
The workshops that he has been conducting where patients, carers and
others are encouraged to give expression to their feelings through art,
even if they have never painted, drawn or sculpted before, can free
people up in quite dramatic ways. There are many potential therapeutic
gains for patients and their families and it is encouraging that our
more enlightened medical and nurse training schools now recognise that
including medical humanities in the curricula has benefits for all.
'The Emotional Cancer Journey' is hopefully just the start of another
journey for us all into gaining not only a greater insight into what
cancer meant for one amazing individual, but also into a deeper analysis
of our own willingness and ability to share the feelings that cancer
generates in ourselves and others.
Professor Lesley Fallowfield
Cancer Research UK Psychosocial-Oncology Group