I Don’t Do Drugs, I Am Drugs!

On Jan. 11, 2025, Cathy Hassels Monning of Amsterdam, posted on LinkedIn Example
2 of 25 in a series of powerful examples of arts and health to start the new year.
Example 2 refers to the attending physician for a patient who has sickle cell disease,
and to Jill Sonke, former artist-in-residence at University of Florida, Centre for Arts in
Medicine, who danced with this 15-year-old girl whenever she was admitted in crisis.
The attending physician who witnessed the reduction in pain and was able to greatly
reduce her pain medication was a colleague of John Graham-Pole, who co-founded the
Center for Arts in Medicine at UF in 1991. As a privileged witness to the two dancers,
John was inspired to record his memory of Jill’s creative dance prompts and the young
girl’s responses as a poem. The poem reveals that both the artist-in-residence and the
girl with sickle cell disease were in a flow state.

Scroll to the end for the poem “I Don’t Do Drugs, I Am Drugs”

“Dancing works better than meds, call arts in medicine”

This is what John’s colleague wrote on Bertice’s hospital chart after he watched her dance.

Bertice has sickle cell disease and fell in love with dance to cope with her pain. With Jill Sonke, former artist in residence at University of Florida, Center for Arts in Medicine, Bertice embraced the magic of movement, finding joy amidst pain.

When asked what happens to her pain when she’s dancing, Bertice said:
“The pain is still there but I don’t care because I feel so good.”

As Jill recounts in her TED Talk ‘Why medicine needs art’:

“As per Bertice’s request when she would dance, the pain medication was reduced by half, because she wanted to be really clear & present for her dancing. After we danced together she was able to maintain that lower dose of medication, usually into the wee hours of the night.”

“Bertice was one of my greatest teachers. She was incredibly adept at getting into that flow state; that space in which we are completely focused and where we lose track of time. Bertice is a master of flow state.

We know that when we engage in that kind of flow state, we can elicit a relaxation response, the opposite of a stress response. When we experience that kind of relaxation response,  our immune system can actually work more effectively.”

#artsinhealth #creativity #innovation #sicklecell #dance #pain

Christopher Bailey, Arts & Health Lead, World Health Organization, posted this response to Cathy Hassels Monning’s post on LinkedIn.

According to the sickle cell institute in Lagos, it is even more specific in this case. The oxytocin released in the flow state actually dilates the blood vessels, relieving the painful sickled cell blood dams. It is more than distraction.

John Graham-Pole composed his remembrances of the event as a poem.

I Don’t Do Drugs, I Am Drugs*

A late-March frost kills my coneflower buds,

bringing fifteen-year-old Brandisha back in crisis,

sickle cells distorted and damming every capillary,

like frostbite in her chest and back and belly.

When I visit, she seems zonked from the IV narcotics:

our only known therapy. But she has her earbuds in,

and her whole body is rolling in rhythm side-to-side

upon her pillows. Her face is at peace.

I rouse her gently: “What’s that music you’re listening to?”

“Beethoven. Pastoral Symphony,” she tells me promptly.

Not the answer that I’d expected.

Jill our resident dancer is beside me. She asks in turn:

“Does it help your pain?” “Yeah. Doesn’t bother me anymore.”

A light bulb goes off: Brandisha’s tapping into her own narcotics.

Jill sweeps multicolored scarves back and forth, then reaches

for her hand, draws her to her feet. They dance in unison.

*Salvador Dali quote

When John Graham-Pole witnessed dancing partners Jill Sonke and 15-year-old Brandisha, there was no cure for sickle cell disease, which disproportionately affects populations from sub-Saharan Africa. Before the poem, he told this story in his memoir, Journeys with a Thousand Heroes: A child oncologist’s story. You will learn that John is not only a poet and a champion of arts for health and arts for health equity, he is also a scientist. He pioneered bone marrow transplants at the University of Florida, including for young people with sickle cell disease. This effectively eliminates the disease. Stem cell transplants (from placental blood) succeeded bone marrow transplants in treating sickle cell disease.

A quantum co-incidence: When Dorothy shared the first rendition of this blog with her adult education colleague Olutoyin Mejiuni in Ibadan, Nigeria, an astonishing revelation. Olutoyin’s daughter Ifeolutembi Fashina is a Genetics scholar and researcher with a PhD from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), Dublin and currently a postdoctoral researcher with RCSI (futureNeuro lab). Her research includes a focus on sickle cell anemia and malaria. She exemplifies the marriage of art and science in her video entitled Till Death Do Us Part, which she created for FameLab Ireland