hoping to put art into operations .... erm, oper-art-ions?

So the thing is ... erm, wow, this is more difficult than I expected ... erm, so anyway, on Thursday 16th December I'm having surgery ... the nice sort of surgery really ... well it's all relative isn't it? ... it's routine surgery and nothing for anyone to worry about but I'll be in hospital for about 5 days and it will take me about 5 weeks to recover.

I won't go into all the gory details in this first blogpost because a) some of you might be as squeamish as I am about this sort of thing and b) I can't remember the proper names for the procedures I'm having. In case the lack of detail is causing unnecessary concern I'll just say that it's to do with 'women's things' and leave it at that for now.

I've decided that I want to turn my experience into something of an amateur experiment in art therapy but I don't want to inflict medical details onto unsuspecting twitter followers or my blog readers ... so I've started this blog and a separate twitter account (@moremorephine) and those who have the stomach for it can follow my adventures here and there.

My initial idea for turning this into an art project is to track my movements with a GPS device to show my recovery as I start moving further from my bed. I'm hoping that I'll be able to use the data to create some beautiful visualisations which will represent my recovery metaphorically and literally.

Since I had that idea I've started wondering about whether I could also wear a heart/pulse monitor to track the changes in my heart rate and then see if I can map it to times when I was particularly stressed/relaxed etc.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to identify a collaborator or two who might help me work out the best tech devices to use and to help create beautiful visualisations at the end. It would be great if I could broadcast some of the data to twitter ... something like http://runkeeper.com/ maybe? Something to track my mood and or pain levels would be good too.

Any advice/help you can offer (or information about similar projects) will be gratefully received :) If you want to collaborate with me or lend me tech gadgets then all the better :)