Jackie in the Bosque
Cyanoprint and Watercolour on Hand Dyed Fabric, 30’’x 54’’
Jackie Chacón is a speech pathologist and musician living and working in Albuquerque.
Q: What is your relationship to the environment/nature going back to childhood, and moving forward to now? To illness?
“I don’t know where I got that tick bite…we were always outside, my friends and I...That was the beginning of 30 plus doctors…I just got so sick, I just kept getting sicker and sicker and had no answers and it was expensive out there (AZ). So I came back and just started seeing a lot of doctors…Western medicine, they do what they do, they are so specialized now. There’s no one looking at all the symptoms, or the whole body. So, [my doctor] prescribed me this stuff called Plaquenil, which is a malaria drug. I had an allergic reaction to it and ended up in the ER. And then she prescribed me a chemo drug. And that’s the only tool in their arsenal. I feel worse with the side effects of these horrible drugs. But there’s sort of an evolving through all of this… you know, I feel like the chemo thing was a tipping point because I realized: you need to stop telling me what to do because this is not resonating. Another doctor told me if I had taken that drug, I may not have lived. Now I put a lot less emphasis on the narrative of ‘my body hates me’ I’m taking this journey in this particular body, so I’ve got to take care of it. It’s not fighting against me. It’s the home for something else. If I see it as the enemy that’s counter productive, that’s not healing at all. I’ve been asking my patients recently…like my Parkinson’s patients: when were you diagnosed? Where were you born? What were you exposed to? …I have patients questioning why they are sick. I have patients who were exposed to pesticides and herbicides and now they are sick. With Lyme disease, climate change has caused a tremendous growth in the tick population because they love warm weather…here we are you know it’s like 105 degrees… So the tick population grows…it’s just way more prevalent. More ticks and more chances to spread it. They are keeping an eye on the mosquito population because they aren’t sure if maybe they can spread Lyme…with climate change anything is possible.”