The Magical Medical Mystery Tour

guest review by Crystal Swenson, student in the “Comics Narratives: Illness, Disability, & Recovery” course, Art Therapy Program,  School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sally Cantirino creates brief insight into the point of view of a medical patient. She explores the qualms, frustrations, and upsets of modern medicine, including reliance on lab work, machines, basic theoretical knowledge, and lack of treating a person as a whole. The zine begins with a layout of the symptoms and emotions that are related to unseen pain and health problems. The emotional, physical, and psychological toll that these diseases take is immense. Suffering silently not only makes endurance more difficult, but can also create a sense of uncontrollable hopelessness and frustration. Physical symptoms may be treated more efficiently as they are manifested in the body, but the emotional and psychological symptoms are a bit more difficult to handle as they are invisible.

Cantirino makes a good point that the patient is the expert on their own experience. Doctors or nurses should be able to see that there is a problem beyond researching specific bodily functions. A patient who continuously returns to a medical setting in search of help with no apparent source of resolution should be more closely monitored. In the comic, the patient ages from age 13 to age 15 to age 18 without any diagnosis, and rather is attributed alternative symptoms that may be caused by another disease. This fully encompasses the “magic” that is alluded to in Cantirino’s title. This mysterious world is so difficult to understand, and equality difficult to diagnose.

The zine begins with a quick story regarding the patient’s diagnosis of cysts on her ovaries. This diagnosis took many years to acquire, as the doctors, nurses, and lab technicians were unable to find anything “abnormal” in her labs, X-rays, and tests.

The snippets of the stories shared, while beautifully illustrated and well presented, seem to just be small chunks of the story. I could tell what was going on with the given information, but as the images progressed, the writings seem to act like a journal for emotions that are presently occurring within the moment– a type of graphic journal that encompasses the experience, rather than a linear story.