Cancerland
Once I started to recover from thyroid cancer in the spring of 2008, I decided to build an exhibit in Second Life about the experience.
This video gives you a sense of how the audio works in. It’s probably the part that makes the exhibit truly immersive.
It’s a fairly large exhibit, with paths that lead you around chronologically through the entire experience. Everywhere you go you see silver balls. These can be touched to trigger additional information, which adds more detail to the narrative.
First, the biopsies. I’m sorry that this part is so short, frankly. I could have built half of this exhibit on the biopsies alone.
I toyed witih using 3d models of a torso, but I discovered that people respond very strongly and powerfully to photos in Second Life, so I used those instead in this version. That picture is actually my passport photo, taken I think a couple of days after my first biopsy. In retrospect, you can actually see my goitre in that picture, because I was leaning forward in it.
The operating room, with the lingering concern about my cat. (What would happen to him while I was off sick?) There are links there to the blog post I wrote at the time, and there’s my tipped over bottle of ativan. I took those elements out for fear of using up too much space on the land. There’s an audio panic attack going on as you enter the operating room.
My artistic rendering of the tumour. I should have asked for pictures, I suppose. I have no idea what a thyroid cancer tumour looks like. Next: the scar room.
I think I could easily have constructed this entire build based solely on the process of becoming reconciled to my scar. The laptops scattered around link you to blog posts I wrote at the time. Again, I originally built these out with prims, but the pictures seem more powerful, in spite of their 2dness.
One of the things I struggled with for a long time in building Cancerland was how to represent symptoms. For the radical drop in body temperature, I’ve currently settled on this:
The walk through fridge.
Another tricky one is “tired”. You can have a bed, but…that doesn’t quite cover it. I’m still not delighted about my current decision, but here’s how I’m managing the “tired” part now:
I should really link my post there about the varieties of tired. What I wanted to get across here was the incredible effort involved in moving, like when you’re underwater. I put in some hidden obstacles under the water, so that you don’t move very quickly through it.
Following the tired section is “brain fog”. Also difficult to explain. Brain fog is what we call it when your brain function is so slowed down that you have trouble making sense of very simple and obvious things.
The way this section works: as you walk over the coloured squares, they change colour, and nonsense text and audio appears. I created it this way because in the depths of brain fog, sometimes people talk to you and you can’t make sense of the sentences. You know they’re speaking to you, and you know it’s in english, and while you can distinguish individual words, you just can’t make them make any sense put together.
After that we have radiation:
…where you can sit on the bed and glow, then the whole body scan:
…which rotates around you as you lay on the bed.
I included my attempt at going back to work:
…with a very nearly scale model of my office, complete with visual and text additions to the narrative. There are pictures on the wall of me being very tired, and some pictures attempting to demonstrate the incredible pain in my hips. After that, I tried to visually express my strange, emotionless, empty period thereafter:
And then a visit to my endocrinologist for my status. Up until this point in the process, I had no idea if I was “cured” or not.
In this visit, I was told that I was cancer-free. One would imagine that would be the end, but it’s really not. Actually I wish I could keep building the exhibit, because there’s so much more to tell.
This box of blackness represents my post traumatic stress reaction to my husband Jeremy leaving the country for his job in Virginia. Somehow part of me believed that if he left, I would get sick again. It was terrifying.
This twisted image is where I’m storing some additional experiences; severe anemia, extreme bleeding and menstrual problems, etc. The long trip back to wellness certainly takes time and patience.
It’s been an incredible experience to build Cancerland, and an even more incredible experience to share with others. I was lucky enough to be invited to join others along the road for this year’s Relay for Life in Second Life with this exhibit, and the response there was overwhelming and touching. My hope is to encourage many other cancer survivors to tell their story in Second Life for next year’s Relay.
If you’d like to see Cancerland for yourself, download Second Life (here) and drop by for a visit.