How has your knitting been able to keep up with your health issues, Jeanette,
because you’ve been really ill?
Yeah, I kind of… my illnesses are pretty well documented and they kind of… in a lot
of ways I don’t like them to define me, but in a lot of ways they’ve actually made me
the person that I am, because before I got ill the very first time… so I was seriously ill
in my early twenties and to be honest with you Katy it probably made me a much
nicer person. You know when you get a life lesson and it just kind of pulls you up and
you just think actually I just kind of need to re-think things here. [So I knitted all the
way through my illnesses and in fact when I was ill the first time… so I had cancer
when I was twenty… twenty-one and I was actually at art college studying textiles at
the time, and I took the decision pretty early on that rather than pack my course in
and go and have treatment, I just thought well I’m not just going to sit around
waiting to have chemotherapy all the time, so I just thought I’d work through it.] So
that actually really helped me to get through my illness, because I just had a focus.
Yeah. And do you find that… I mean knitting’s a great thing. People use it as a kind of
waiting game. You can do it in the waiting room literally. But did it have any other
benefits for you in terms of cognitively? So you had brain tumours and brain
surgery, so there must have been for you a certain element of re-building that
happened after that. You were still able to knit when you were recovering?
Oh yeah. That was one of the things I made a kind of real conscious decision
pretty earlier on. So I had my brain surgery on Tuesday I think it was, and by the
Thursday of the following week I was knitting. Because I just thought having not
been able to do pretty much anything in the month before my surgery because it
had just thrown a real kind of curveball, I just thought okay I just need to try and
gather myself here and just see if I can still do this, because I wasn’t sure what
effect the surgery would have… so I had two brain tumours and they took them
both out at the same time, and I just thought I’m not sure whether this is going to
leave me the same person. And I thought well if I can still knit then that’s kind of
essentially me. So I decided that when I was in hospital waiting for them to take my
staples out… I’ve got a big scar there… I think I had about fourteen staples in my
head. And so I was sitting on the ward waiting to have them taken out and I was
knitting, but I was knitting lace. And I just thought if I can knit lace I’ll be fine!
