Art as therapy: Painter Amanda Russel shares her skills, history at Providence Portland Medical Center

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The quote tattooed on Amanda Russel's right wrist is in Spanish but translate it to English and the words from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" read: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

When she got the body art seven years ago, at 19, the message rang true.

Four years later, beauty and painlessness vanished in one day.

Russel's joints ached. Her back cramped. A rash mottled her face. She was so thirsty she drank a gallon of water, yet couldn't urinate.

As she packed a bag so a roommate could take her to the hospital, Russel's legs gave out. She hasn't walked since. Acute transverse myelitis, inflammation of the spinal cord, caused by a Lupus flare in Russel's case, paralyzed her from about the navel down.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, though, she rolled her wheelchair into Providence Portland Medical Center, slipped into an elevator and hit 4. Rolling out, she headed down a hall, past a nursing station and into the room where in December 2010 she spent hours every day for 2½ weeks, trying to learn how to live in her new, less mobile reality.

Last year, when members of the Providence Acute Rehabilitation Center's medical staff asked if she'd like to return as a volunteer, perhaps using art as a medium to help patients heal, Russel agreed. She knew she could contribute and she was grateful to 4K, as the unit is known. Doctors, nurses and therapists there, she says, "gave me my function and independence back."

When she was a patient, she'd scarcely gone a day without sketching images depicting the confusion, panic, fear and sadness she felt as a newly paralyzed 23-year-old.

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