My brief foray into illustration during high school drew heavily on my own life experiences 😉

Today – a fun blast from my past.

But first – We have been inside for nearly two straight days due to an extreme cold weather warning. Monday morning we woke up to wind chills of -40 degrees Celsius. It’s good we got out for a run on Saturday afternoon because as scary cold as that was, this is much, much worse. We can barely get the dogs to go out back to do their dog business. I literally have to push their bums down the deck steps. I’m like a crazy lady running around wearing my husband’s Canadian dinner jacket waving a broom in the air trying to corral the freezing dogs. I think Teelo could hold it just about forever but the potential consequence of this type of bathroom willpower also stresses me out. So, dogs bums pushed down the stairs by the crazy dog lady it is.

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And now – may I present to you, Sandy Goes to the Hospital.

I created this cartoon for the old Mississauga Hospital back in grade 10 or 11 when I was volunteering there (and it was still called Mississauga Hospital). I volunteered there for a few years in high school. I had a vague idea that I wanted to go to medical school one day and it seemed like a good strategy to volunteer in a hospital. I helped for a long time as a greeter in Emergency intake which seemed pretty intense and high stress for a fifteen-year-old?!? I don’t think I liked it very much to be honest. Anyway, when I discovered that they were still using the same “welcome to the hospital” colouring book for kids that I received when I got my tonsils out in grade 2 (!) I volunteered my drawing services.

I actually ended up doing a few different art projects through volunteer services but the coloring book came first. They kind of entrusted me to redo the old one, page for page. I’m pretty sure I renamed the main character Sandy because my younger sister and I were heavily, heavily into the move Grease for several years through high school. I’m also pretty sure that the doctor was based on Dr. Carter (played by Noah Wyle) from ER which my sister and I were also heavily into during the NBC Must See TV era. So, so weird in retrospect but hey, there it is.

Sandy was surprisingly chill about being told that she would need to be admitted to the hospital and none of these people have fingers, just mitt hands:

Sunflowers were kind of my thing back in high school, that’s a sunflower on Sandy’s shirt – not the sun or just any old flower.

Sandy was getting her tonsils out because I had also had my tonsils removed years before and this was my closest frame of reference for an operation or medical intervention. In 2019 I think this is now an outpatient procedure – you go to the hospital for a few hours and go home the same day, it’s not really a thing – but in the late 1980s it was still a bit of a big deal. It was like a 10-14 day recovery (off school!!!). I remember being on the couch and watching A LOT of Little House on the Prairie reruns (you didn’t get to choose back then and that’s what was on TV on weekday afternoons apparently). Before the operation I had to go in for a pre-op work-up and you had to stay overnight. That was the most stressful part for me because 7-year-old me had to stay overnight at the hospital by myself after the actual operation.

This was how the actual entrance to the old Mississauga Hospital used to look. And these cartoon people kind of (?) look like my parents except my dad never owned a sweater like that.

I remember I really obsessed over the spelling of paediactric (or pediatric?). Even now this is making my head turn in a funny way to make it look right. I Googled it and it turns out this is a thing to wonder the correct spelling – and both are right. Count on me to use the spelling that seems more pretentious.

Again, so many happy people, including this poor boy with two broken limbs? What on earth?

And THAT is the most terrifying needle I have ever seen:

All together now:

I know that the point of this colouring book was to make the hospital seem friendly (and not scary) and more accessible for little kids but I just cannot get over how deliriously happy the characters in this little colouring book are. It’s pretty funny. I wonder if it’s still in use?

I even got a little bit of press for my work! This beauty of a pic was taken of me in my volunteer smock for The Mississauga News.

And another article in my high school newspaper (I think?):

Looking at these old drawings and clips reminds me that I used to combine my art side and my science side wherever possible. There was a fair amount of cross-over and I always had the prettiest science projects 🙂 There was a time, maybe in grade 11, that I went to the University of Toronto to check out their medical illustration graduate program. Sometimes I think that was a bit of a missed opportunity for me. I imagine myself working from home, holed up in my studio (the dogs are there too) and just spending my days drawing highly technical illustrations of teeth and eyeballs and whatever you might need to fill a science textbook. I think that would’ve been really, really cool. But, like so many things that have kind of gone more technical over the years, my sense is that there’s more computer illustration used now in medical illustration than actual watercolours on paper and that’s not something I would’ve really enjoyed. Still, it’s interesting to reflect on what could’ve been (you know, the whole Frost fork in the road quote, kind of sort of?) and in the very least share these funny little illustrations for you on this cold Tuesday.

Thanks for reading everyone! Hopefully the cold will break later this afternoon and we will finally be able to get the dogs out to walk off some of those crazy sillies that have been building up!!!