The art of radiotherapy
Sue was an art teacher when she was diagnosed.
“I used to tell the doctors who decided my treatment that they were being creative,” she says.
“I remember my oncologist saying, ‘I’ve never been called creative before’, but they had to put the pieces together to make this picture work.
“They made me a cocktail, and although it was a very aggressive, harsh cocktail, it let me come out the other end. So, it is creativity. Every scientist is being creative.”
That creativity also inspired Sue to make an image of her own.
The idea started when doctors gave her threepinpoint tattoos to help line up their radiotherapy beams correctly for each treatment session.
“They were my first tattoos,” says Sue. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got tattoos – and it didn’t hurt!’ After that, I just went mad.”
Not straight away. Cancer statistics often refer to ‘five-year survival’, so, five years after her treatment finished, Sue started the process of turning her body into her canvas.
“I wanted to celebrate my scars and transform them into something beautiful,” she says. “It would be my way of reclaiming control of my body – I’d be making a statement that cancer doesn’t always have to leave the last mark.”
She chose to cover her chest with a design of lotus flowers and mandala patterns, which she’d fallen in love with while travelling in India.
“Lotus flowers bloom from really muddy, murky water, and they blossom into something beautiful,” she explains. “It was an analogy between the dankness of the water as the cancer and then my life being reclaimed as the beautiful flowers.
“Now, every morning, when I get into the shower and see myself in the bathroom mirror, I don’t see scars. I see this beautiful pattern.”