Ruth, a photographer, was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease at the age of 37. She decided to document her journey through chemo, radiation and recovery and ended up on the path to something wonderful.
Ruth's Story
"I was pretty upset that I had no idea what was going to happen to me."
I started looking for information and found that there were no books on survival, no books that showed the journey. There were books that showed the journey towards death, but no books that showed the journey towards life. Lance Armstrong has great books about what he went through, and then there are all these great photojournalistic essays about people dying from cancer. Everybody has done it, I've done it, I photographed my grandmother's last six months and I made a book on her. I was pretty arrogant about the fact that I was going to beat this thing, so it felt really important that I do something that showed this was not automatically a death sentence. I wanted to document what was happening to me and give it a happy ending.
"It was a good way to put every day to bed, just to let go."
I started taking my photo two days into treatment, on Dec. 20, with the hopes of turning my experience into a book for other people to turn to. A lot of it at the beginning was about what I looked like; this is my hair that I have had since I was two years old and it is going to be gone. I set up a camera studio up in the attic and the door to my attic is in my bedroom so I could get up there very easily. I had a 4X5 camera, a light, and just something very simple so that no matter how I was feeling there was something I could do very easily. They started to grow in piles pretty quick and I would make sure that it said what I wanted it to say and then I would lay it down to dry. I didn't look at them for a long time. Then in April, some of my students came over and asked how it was going. We brought everything down, and it covered the living room floor -- this was only four months in. Once I saw it all laid out like that I thought, "Wow, I am doing the right thing and this is going to be interesting and it is going to be worth looking at." That was also the first time I could look at the different images at the same time and see something is happening and this is changing.
"It's unremarkable."
I spent a lot of time with what to call the show from the very beginning, and I never had something that I was happy with. Then one day, I was sitting in my doctor's office and I asked for my scans. I turned to my doctor, who I had a sarcastic relationship with, and I said, "I am not unremarkable." He said, "No, that is what you want to hear, that means that they didn't find anything." That word really stuck with me. The bottom line is that this was just a year in my life and if you look at any single picture it really is unremarkable.
"It was very cathartic to do."
Anytime you go through a catastrophic event, you forget it; you try to hold onto it, but you can't. I was able to document every day and walk away from it, it was done it was a complete thought and it was over. Now I am able to go back and revisit what I went through and remember what I want to remember and not what I don't want to remember. It became this ritual that I made it through another day, I survived another day, and I am one step closer to being done with this treatment, and I am one step closer to being healthy again. It was very cathartic to do. I didn't plan that when I started to do the show, but it definitely was a positive thing for me.
