The back story on why/what I do...

My story:

I have had 5 surgeries on my right shoulder, 1 on my left ankle, and nerve damage on my right ankle.

The right ankle injury was caused by playing mud volleyball in 6th grade and I twisted my ankle to the outside and slightly tore a nerve. Unlike tearing a ligament or something muscular a nerve is hard to repair because you can’t just open it up and sow it back together. I had to undergo 7 nerve blocks in the back in attempts to “rebut” my nerves. Imagine it to be a computer and when it is acting up you restart it and you hope when it comes back on it will correct itself. This is what they were hoping for because the nerve block shuts down the signals to that nerve in the ankle which makes it numb and when I regained feeling they were hoping the pain would decrease or go away all together. It ended up working overtime but as you can imagine it was very hard for someone at that age to go through because of the amount of pain involved. To this day I will occasionally have pain in that ankle.

The right shoulder injury was caused by a couple different things but it all started at the age of 15 playing softball. My first surgery was to remove a “tea spoon” size of my bursa sack because the swelling wouldn’t go away. The second one was to fix a torn ligament and remove a bone spur. The third was another torn ligament. I was finally getting better and then I was hit by a car walking through a parking lot. I had two surgeries to try and fix the same problem, a SLAP tear. The first surgery, or should I say fourth, didn’t work because the dissolvable nail placed in my shoulder broke somehow so they had to go back in again and fix it. The fifth surgery left me with two screws and metal wire/rope stuff in there to keep that ligament together and attached to my bone. Throughout all of this I had A LOT of physical therapy and way too many cortisone shots, which are a large reason to why I can’t lift anything more than 25lbs. While cortisone helps with some things like capsulitis (aka frozen shoulder) which is very painful, it weakens the muscles and if I lift anything more then that I risk tearing my bicep muscle completely off and it be curled up at my elbow. My right shoulder will forever hurt and I was told it is just something I will have to deal with since it has undergone so much but I try and manage it with limiting myself and medication.

My left ankle was injured from a motorcycle wreck were I was thrown 15 feet and suffered a concussion, road rash, slightly dislocated right hip, and left ankle pain. I have had surgery on that ankle to remove a ligament that got stuck between my two joints as well as a torn tendon. I have also had joint replacement injections in attempts to regain more cartilage lost from the injury and surgery to fix it. I have since suffered another injury to that same ankle and have been told I need surgery but I have decided to hold off and hope time will heal it because as you can imagine I’m so very tired of having surgeries.
Throughout all of these things I have gone through the range of emotions, especially depression. These things have not just affected me but my friends and family as well. I have to live every day as it comes and just try and manage pain. I have gotten better with this and emotionally it doesn’t get to me as much but is physically exhausting.


My Art:

My art work concentrates on chronic pain. I like to analyze how it affects the person plagued by this as well as the effects it has on the people around them. I am attempting to make this a more universal topic and not let my personal experience be the only thing showing through, even though that is very hard. I like to make my work interactive as well forcing to the viewer to participate in some way to reveal all of the aspects of the work.