When a faculty member in anatomy asked Dr. Bihun if she could draw figures he needed for a paper, she says she had a light bulb moment. “It dawned on me that I could apply my illustration skills for research. I hadn’t thought to apply artistic interpretation directly to scientific data. Medical illustration was new to me. My first project was a colored pencil drawing of the angular vein.”

In the spring of her first year of medical school, the Distinction track in Applied Medical and Health Humanities was established, and she applied with the aim of studying visual arts.

Dr. Bihun met with Mayo Clinic medical illustrators to learn more about their skills and realized she’d need to learn digital painting skills. She mastered those skills on her own and practiced by filling additional requests for scientific illustrations depicting the use of ultrasound for facial soft tissue filler and toxin injections, ophthalmic artery branches, and vasa previa types, among others.

She says creating medical illustrations helps her to learn, especially anatomy. “Every line on the page is a decision. Art is iterative — back and forth, trying things, returning to them over and over in an effort to improve. That discipline is important for my clinical work and growth as a physician.”

Dr. Bihun also draws nonmedical subjects and writes poetry. She does it to process her feelings as a medical trainee and about medical problems she’s had.

She also enjoys textile arts. She says it helps keep her calm and her hands busy. “One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother teaching me to cross-stitch. She was a prolific sewist and stitcher. In the few moments she took aside to teach me to use the needle, she handed me the same thread that has been passed from mother to daughter and granddaughter for generations.”

For her wedding in 2022, Dr. Bihun made a rushnyk, a ceremonial cloth representing a Ukrainian couple’s new home together. Traditionally, the bride makes the rushnyk, sewing her hopes and wishes for the marriage into it. The couple stands on the cloth throughout the wedding ceremony.

“This was my way of integrating my husband’s Ukrainian culture with my own,” she says. “It was a labor of love over nine months.”

Dr. Bihun says art teaches a way of seeing humanity in herself and in others. “A doctor is a servant of human needs experienced by real people in moments of crisis. There is a discipline in seeing this way. Both art and medicine are disciplines that are never fully accomplished in a way that can be checked off a to-do list. It is a practice — a way of living. It is being human. Part of what attracted me to Mayo Clinic was the Humanities in Medicine program and medical school selectives. I’m grateful for these many experiences and plan to continue to pursue them throughout my career and life.” 

Dr. Bihun matched in radiology — a visually oriented field — at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and hopes to continue to use her artistic skills to portray research and discovery and enhance patient education.