It's Elise Hugh, you're listening to TED Talks Daily.

Today, a talk about an unlikely partnership between healthcare and comics.

In her 2021 talk from TEDx YYC, comic creator and designer Sam Hester introduces us to her mom, Jocelyn, and shows us the power of

advocating for a patient's experience through words and pictures.

This is the story of how I used comics to help me in my role as a caregiver for my mom,

in a way I couldn't have imagined. Now, when I was thinking

about how to tell that story, I talked a lot about it with my mom. That's because this story's

hers. My mom's name is Jocelyn, and we're not alike. She's an optimist. I worry about all the

terrible things that are going to go wrong. She's impulsive. I'm cautious.

We're so different that it took me a long time to realize we had something important in common.

We both respond to challenges by writing stories.

Now it took me such a long time to notice that we had this in common because the stories we wrote were so different.

She self-published a book of poems and short stories about living with Parkinson's disease over the last 20 years.

I write comics, and my comics are about stuff like life with my mom.

Now, over the years, my mom and I got used to her physical health challenges.

But a while ago, she started having

cognitive challenges too. She couldn't write stories anymore, and communication between us kept getting

harder. My mom's doctor didn't get it. He asked her questions like, well, what city are you in?

She knows the answer. He asked, what year is it? Well, she knew that answer, too. He just said, you're fine.

But my mom had been having hallucinations. She sometimes thought she was surrounded by ghostly people.

The doctor couldn't see it, but my mom could. I want to tell you about graphic medicine, a growing movement that refers to an unlikely partnership

between health care and comics.

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