Incidentaloma 2012
Photographs by Ross Scott, John Williams, Mark Beehre
& an unknown photographer
Curated by Mark Beehre

Incidentaloma

In medicine, ‘incidentalomas’ are unexpected findings on a scan done for some quite unrelated reason, small nodules that are usually nothing but need follow-up to make sure they don’t turn out to be cancerous. One day in the spring of 2010 when I got off my bike after cycling home my right thumb turned white, cold and painful. This was the third time that week, and the doctor in the Emergency Department suggested a CT scan of the aorta to see if there was anything there that might be causing clots to fly off and land in my thumb. There wasn’t, but what the scan did show was a small lesion, less than a centimetre, in the middle lobe of my right lung: an incidentaloma.
 
‘It’s a scrappy little thing,’ said the respiratory colleague whom I consulted, but after the 18-month follow-up scan he was less sanguine. ‘This thing’s growen,’ he said in his mellifluous Welsh accent. ‘You’ll have to have it out.’ The surgeon I saw recommended a wedge resection, removing just enough lung to get rid of the lesion. Eleven days later my partner Ross and I sat in his office as he passed the pathologist’s report across the desk. ‘Sections of lung show adenocarcinoma … excision appears complete.’ He was kind and earnest in an awkward, schoolboyish sort of way, and later I said to my friends, ‘When I had cancer I didn’t want empathy or bedside manner. I wanted a surgeon with a sharp knife.’
 
To maximise the chance of cure I was advised to go on and have a right middle lobectomy, removing all the part of the lung that had contained the tumour along with the regional lymph nodes. On 11 June 2012 I was back in hospital for this much bigger operation. I documented the whole process photographically. In the ward my friend John Williams and my partner Ross Scott took photographs, and in the operating theatre I gave a camera to the anaesthetic technician to record the surgery itself. The pictures tell the story.

Mark Beehre
July 2025

A dance with cancer.
 
As a partner I stood by Mark in the dance as he went from the initial suspicion of cancer through to surgery and recovery. It was his dance with cancer, with death. I was there supporting him, being a presence as the music played and the dance moved with uncertainty, with grace, with tension, and with times of introspection. One day a slow waltz, the next a wild tango. The lead of the dance moving between Mark and death till it ended with a bow. Cancer stood aside and Mark stepped from the dance floor to live, with thanks to medical intervention.
 
But the dance will go on, a new persona of death will step forward and take Mark on another dance, as death has already done with me on a couple of occasions.  We live in an age where it is not just a loving partner alongside on the dance floor, but as you can see in the exhibition we have a massive medical system that steps in to guide the music and change the outcome. Medically Assisted Living. Yet the dance will go on.
 
The new art of living and dying is to navigate our way around the dance floor. Learning that the dance with death is as natural as that of our conception which gave us life. Our new challenge is to see when it is time to say to Medically Assisted Living ‘Thank you, but no thank you’ and then turning to death and leave the dance floor together.

Ross Scott
July 2025

Photobook

The 44-page Incidentaloma photobook is available from Mark Beehre for $25 + postage. Click here to order.

With thanks--

—to respiratory physician David Jones, surgeon Glenn McKay, anaesthetist Bob Ure, and all the wonderful nursing and allied health staff at Wakefield Hospital. Thanks also to John Williams (JW) for his friendship and photography, to the anaesthetic technician (AT) who took the intra-operative photographs (I tried to track him down), and to James Gilberd of Photospace Gallery. Most of all, thanks to Ross Scott (RS) for his enduring love and support throughout these past twenty years.