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Mark Beehre
Capital & Coast DHB, New Zealand |
BIOGRAPHY
Since completing his specialist training as a General Physician, Mark has held positions at Middlemore, North Shore, Masterton, Kenepuru and Wellington Hospitals, as well as undertaking occasional locum work throughout New Zealand and in Australia. For more than a decade he has pursued a parallel career as a photographer, writer and oral historian, pursuing postgraduate qualifications in Fine Arts and exhibiting and publishing on an ongoing basis while continuing to work part-time in hospital practice. At the end of 2012, following major surgery, he took time out from medicine entirely to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree. A year later, he rejoined the staff at Capital and Coast DHB in a part-time capacity, where he is involved with acute general medical care.
ABSTRACT
Carcinoma: A Personal Journey
One Friday afternoon in the spring of 2010 I was walking up the stairs at the side of our house when I lost the circulation in my right thumb. The cause of that was never established, and the thumb came right, but in the course of the work-up I had a CT scan that showed a small nodule in my right lung. For a long time I dismissed it as of no concern—I had never smoked, it was probably a granuloma, an anxiety-inducing incidentaloma best ignored—but two years later the thing had grown. ‘You’ll have to have it out,’ my respiratory colleague told me, and the histology on the wedge resection came back as adenocarcinoma. A month later I was recovering from a lobectomy.
Given my background as a photographer, it was natural for me to want to document the entire diagnostic and surgical process. With the assistance of my partner, friends, and the operating theatre staff, I created a photographic record of the journey from the CT scanner through the operating theatre and into the cardiothoracic surgical ward. Along with the photographs and a description of the events, I have also recorded my own reflections on what I determined to embrace as a healing process in the most holistic sense. The resulting presentation thus incorporates images and commentary and is both a documentary exercise and a meditation on the impact of a serious, unexpected medical event on life and work as a physician.
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