My initial career goal was to be a cardiologist. Since the 6th grade, every science project was conditioned around this subject. I even interviewed doctors in high school, and one provided me with an actual pacemaker to use with my display. Once I chose English as my study, doctors still contended that I could go on to medical school: “We need doctors who can read and write.”
As an undergraduate, I worked at the hospital as an EKG monitor technician. In the cardiac intensive care unit, I was responsible for monitoring 10 EKG screens at a time. On fewer occasions, I had to move to the unit floor. In this room, I would find 40 screens that represented the 40 patients residing. I had the extreme privilege of being locked away in this room for 12 hours (7pm-7 am), accompanied only by the multiple images before me. Thus, this image above represents a good night. It means all is well, and patients are sleep. It means a stress free night for me, the patients, nurses, and doctors.
The slightest change could mean the difference between life and death, so the text questions what it means to be alive (how fleeting life can be, and how important a moment can be to impact change). The image has the power to excite or calm, and induce response. Any deviation from the image, above, could mean a number of things, and the image told stories and gave a certain history.
It was my job to interpret. 1) I had to rule out interference. The patients could be having a seizure or simply moving around. They could have a normal dysrhythmia that doesn’t cause alarm. The patient could just have dysrhythmia due to his or her breathing patterns while sleeping. In this case, the image may be different but not troubling. 2) The image indicated the patient’s history of blocks, in the atrium and/or ventricle. It indicated heart failure and even the presence of a pacemaker. In some cases, I had to be aware of medications that cause changes. 3) In worse cases, the image could represent ultimate lost, not simply a flat line but through a number of other signs to put the medical team on alert (code blue). In one case, the image was quite misleading. The patient had died but the image showed electrical activity due to medications given. When all media starts to associate the image of a flat line (asystole) with passing, it’s hard to imagine any other sign representing the same end. Ultimately, it was my job to see the image, and know the patient through a screen. It was important to make record of changes and know the meaning by the alterations of the line’s movement.
Now, the image connects me with love ones when I go to the hospital, knowing what the doctors know, and what patients usually don’t understand. It orders me to appreciate the image because it means life. In commonplace we associate the biological heart with the representation of love, so the image challenges the phrase “my heart skipped a beat,” what it means to be in love, and even how I view the commercialize image of Valentine’s Day. I now associate the phrase with pain knowing what it could mean: stress or other underlying conditions like second degree block or most fatal, third- degree block which cannot sustain life, let alone love.
Your image here makes me think of how we attempted to "read" the hurricane maps in class last week. I spent a lot of time depending on the words in your image to understand what was going in. I think it is a very clear representation of how images and words work together. With my (small to say the least) knowledge of heart monitors...mainly from TV... I would suggest that this is the kind of piece that the words and image truly work together to create an entire understanding. Imagine if you had the read only version of all the monitors you were watching for change. EEK.
ReplyDeleteYour experience and knowledge behind this image definitely has brought to light some things to me as I look at it. In terms of Berger, what kind of image is this?
I wonder if it also could be situated in a similar conversation to last class where we focused on the scientific tradition? Here I also see room for a discussion of function and purpose. The function of this image could be to teach (since the heart monitor is actually a "moving" text")? Or perhaps to show what a heart monitor looks like, and how we are readers could interpret it. Kinda like a map? This makes me think about the different between images that are "still" and captured images that are a moment in motion... again back to the google map of the hurricane, but also (potentially) to the image I chose.