Diary Drawing Day 669 , 2007
30.5 x 22.9 cm (h x w)
Watercolour and pencil on paper

This one, it's got the Beverage Bay in it, I had to include it. As I mentioned before, so many terrible things were going on. I got diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. And I had been feeling incredibly ill for about two years, passing out in supermarkets - collapsing when I got the milk in in the morning. And the medical professional doctors, was a good doctor kept telling me I was overwhelmed emotionally, they just saw it all as emotional. Once you...that's the problem about psychiatric diagnosis if you've got that, it's called ‘diagnostic overshadowing’. They don't take you seriously as a person, any symptoms are seen as a sign of emotional distress. And I actually had a really large tumour growing. I'm amazed I'm still alive. It was so advanced. But once I met, this is University College London, once I met the oncology team there, everything changed. I was treated like a real person, a whole person, by this extraordinary network of professionals who just took me in and treated me incredibly well and saved my life. But at the same time, my mum was dying. And I've been talking to her on the day of, every day during my life during those few years, because she was very distressed. She was in her 90s. And so I spoke to her every day, it was very hard. Luckily, she never knew I had cancer, that would have been too awful to think that she died not knowing that I would survive. So I had the surgery and then two days later, I was told she'd died. And there's me it was on the 13th floor, the Gynea Ward, and that's Euston Road in London, and there's me in the Beverage Bay. None of the staff realised where I used to..."I'm just going to the Beverage Bay.", which I thought was the most hilariously cheering thing I'd ever heard in the NHS and they had a little sign up saying "Beverage Bay" and you could get cups of tea and coffee. But I'm weeping looking out at the world in a state of, well just being overwhelmed by grief and shock at what had happened, but there's the cars whizzing past, and some trees and I survived. And there's my wonderful Prussian blue because it's nighttime.

Exhibited by:

Outside In

Other works by Bobby Baker

Diary Drawing Day 711 , 2008
30.5 x 22.9 cm (h x w)
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Outside In
Diary Drawing Day 630 , 2007
30.5 x 22.9 cm (h x w)
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Outside In
Diary Drawing Day 579 , 2006
30.5 x 22.9 cm (h x w)
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Outside In
Diary Drawing Day 527 , 2005
30.5 x 22.9 cm (h x w)
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Outside In
Diary Drawing Day 526 , 2005
30.5 x 22.9 cm (h x w)
Watercolour and pencil on paper
Outside In

More from Outside In

Exhibition information
Outside In
Untitled
30 x 20 cm (h x w)
Oil pastel on paper
Outside In
Bicycle , 1990
30 x 20 cm (h x w)
Oil pastel on paper
Outside In
Anne Waggot Knott 2
Outside In
REP^IR: Forms for the Future 7 , 2023
30 x 30 cm (h x w)
Outside In