Chemo stitches

Chemo Stitches is a post that the blogger from Undone graciously offered to put up on the site, as it talks about the craft experience in the midst of cancer treatment… I’m very, very pleased that she let me post it here! Enjoy.

I learnt to knit as a child – my mum taught me and I knitted a very straggly scarf that my dad still keeps, carefully folded, on the top of his chest of drawers. Then, I knitted a very boring, gray, sleeveless cardigan - in ’school colours’ - but it had that loopy, ineptly-knitted look so I hardly wore it. It was too different and I was sure it would become just another item in the arsenal of those who sneered at me regularly. So my knitting career hit a hiatus.

Some 10 years later I picked up the pointy-sticks again – I can’t really remember what drove me; perhaps just that I’d been home and found yarn and needles and brought them back; but I did and, rather ineptly again, I started knitting an R2 sweater in the wrong yarn with the wrong needles without even bothering to do a gauge-swatch because I wanted to be knitting that instant.

It was winter – with that darkness that descends in January and continues until March; where it’s dark when you leave in the morning and dark when you get home in the evening. My best friend from schooldays was pregnant and I was determined that I was going to knit something; a lacy blanket to be exact - I had aspirations, but it was crawling along; at the rate I was knitting it would be finished by the time her daughter was old enough to go to school. It didn’t help that I was so tired; I would knit a row and my eyes would be swimming. And trying to concentrate on the pattern I’d chosen, which wasn’t the most straight-forward, was a challenge – especially when, at the back of my head, was the fear. At Christmas I’d noticed my right breast was swollen and a hand, quickly snatched away, had told me there was something there that probably shouldn’t be. I was so scared that I pretended it wasn’t there and I knitted to take up the space in my head; in the hope that I could expel the fear with every stitch; that the pattern would soothe and comfort me.

But I’m not that much of a fool, I saw my GP and was referred to the Breast Clinic at a nearby hospital – a phrase and place that struck white-cold, icy, frozen fear in me; where of course, ultimately, my diagnosis was cancer and I was thrown into a whirlwind of treatment, of continuous fear, of medication-induced anxiety, of real anxiety; of endless sitting in corridors, outside of offices, in hospital rooms, in waiting rooms, in waiting areas that were corridors outside of offices – the great wait. And then the waiting at home – I suddenly turned from someone who was at work 5 days a week, with Guides one evening a week, working until 9 one evening a week, choir one evening a week to someone who sat at home feeling sick, being sick, and watching her hair fall out whilst remembering that all of this was going to (might) make me better (we hoped)…

I needed something to do – something to occupy my hands, to distract my mind – something to stop me seeing all the other people with no hair and pain in their faces in the chemo-suite; and some way to control the ‘what if…’ refrain that danced round in my head. And each stitch did that – I taught myself to crochet and I taught myself to tension my knitting properly. The yarn and its texture was soft and warm and comforting. The repetition of each stitch, one after another, after another was soporific – it calmed my mind and became a kind of meditation or hypnosis. On particularly bad days I would imagine that each stitch was making me calmer and calmer and more and more relaxed – I had a little ‘mantra’ where I told myself, over and over again as I knitted or crocheted, that I was becoming calmer and calmer. It got to a point that I could always gauge exactly how nervous I was by the speed at which I was knitting – waiting in the chemo clinic corridor, where there were frequently delays, would produce excessive speed but if I was clever and hadn’t chosen a difficult pattern then it was OK – not too many mistakes and I could bring in to play my calming mantra and get through it. If I didn’t have my knitting or crocheting then you would see my foot tapping and twitching – the stitches were the outlet for that excess of nervous tension. They drained the swooping adrenaline that would otherwise have resulted in my screaming at people or descending into howling tears or, most likely, both.

And my woollen work found me friends – it was something that people could see and talk to me about that wasn’t cancerous or cancery. Around the hospital, staff and patients would stop and ask what I was making, would tell me about their grannies or their mums or aunties who had knit, would share their memories of things that they’d made, would admire the color or the texture or the pattern of my yarn. At a time when there was little else going on in my life, when I felt like someone who could only talk about cancer it became something else in my repertoire. When I couldn’t stand to talk about cancer and how I was feeling I could tell people that I was spending my time knitting. And then I didn’t sound or feel quite so hopelessly useless - because I had turned into someone useless – I slept for at least 12 hours at night; when I could sleep – I could hardly walk around my block and when I did I had to hang on to someone’s arm and stop for little breathers or my knees would give way – when I was at work it was only for a few hours a day and my concentration was so appalling that I was probably coming up with absolute rubbish – and in my head my body was a broken, treacherous thing. What use was I? I was a sick, unreliable, mutilated thing. At least when I knit I was doing something productive, I was producing something; actual items – I wasn’t totally hopeless or useless.

I still have and I still wear and use the items I knitted and crocheted during that time. The denim blue crocheted shawl that was the product of the radiotherapy waiting room – radiotherapy involves a lot of waiting; more waiting than treatment time actually. The blue and white self-patterning yarn made into a tea-cosy – that saw several chemotherapy treatments and sat around in the chemo-suite to the amusement of the nurses. My very first crochet piece – a very wonky bag – again, in blue (bit of a trend there). I feel no ambivalence to these items – I did wonder if I would feel that they were somehow imbued with the poison, the fear, the horrific-ness of that time, but they’re not. I am proud of them; they are beautiful and I made them; I have that talent and they remind me of some of the good things – they remind me of the time I spent with my mum through my treatment; of stolen trips to the yarn-shop or feeding the ducks in Regent’s Park. I couldn’t have gotten through my cancer treatment without it – I think I would have actually lost my mind. It would have been overwhelmed and lost by the fear and I would never have come back.

That lacy baby-blanket? It was an odd pattern made up of triangles knitted from the tip up – I cast off what I’d knit already on the first triangle and it was just the right size to use as a head scarf to keep the snow off my chemo-shorn head. Almost as if I’d known.

Em

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