Mr Robert Wheeler is Consultant Neonatal & Paediatric Surgeon at Southampton Children’s Hospital whose main interest is children’s cancer surgery. He tells us how his passion for watercolour painting helps educate and inform families about procedures.
I started watercolouring as a challenge. The anaesthetist whom I worked with was a great colleague, but he took an unusual amount of time to wake the child at the end of an operation. One of the theatre nurses complained that I was impatient and that instead of fretting over lost time, I should do something useful.
She said to me, “Why don’t you paint a picture?” So, I did.
My father was an artist, so I had some idea of art materials, and I reckoned that I would make the least mess with watercolours. I was too frightened of the theatre sister to risk spilling oil paint everywhere! For 20 years, I just painted on the history sheets in children’s surgical case notes...and so there are hundreds of pictures of appendicitis and other common child surgical emergencies in the paper records in some warehouse in Hampshire.
And, almost as many pictures of the congenital structural malformations that we correct in newborn babies.
Most likely, the pictures ended up in a furnace long ago. But actually, I don’t mind. The purpose of the pictures - apart from me enjoying painting them - was to explain to my patient’s parents what the illness inside the abdomen or chest or pelvis actually looked like. It’s all very well using a camera during the operation, but in truth all anyone sees in an operative photograph is a blur of various shades of red and pink. It’s common in surgical textbooks to see such operative images displayed upside down - since it’s near impossible to discern the right way up!
We’ve had electronic notes for nearly 10 years, so I now put the watercolours in books and scan the images so that I can give the parents or child a paper copy, while the PDF goes into the e-notes. I think this also helps the nurses, since they’re often unable to come to theatre. Even if they can attend the operation, they don’t get such a good view peering over my shoulder. If they can see my version of what
I saw, the written operation notes make much more sense. If there’s an image available, I think it makes it more likely that clinicians will be prompted to read the notes. Since most of my work is linked to oncology, it can sometimes be difficult to remember, in the post-operative clinic, which child had which tumour. Now I have the image scanned in the notes, I have an immediate reminder.
