Knitting and Cancer

“You can sit and knit while receiving your infusion.” The physician’s assistant who conducted my chemotherapy orientation (yes, just like for freshman newly arrived on campus but with fewer ice breakers) made the whole process seem almost pleasant. And I was, in fact, a knitter, the type of knitter abbreviates “works in progress” to WIPs and, at the time, had no less than three WIPs in various, extremely cute project bags and one yarn stash large enough to require a big bin. But it had been months, maybe even a whole year or so since I had knitted. I had let that particular hobby drift to the wayside. I didn’t really think that cancer treatment would be the time that I was going to pick it up again.

I love knitting. There’s a certain satisfaction of language fluency in reading and successfully following a pattern. And there’s the return to a WIP again and again, the gradual progress.  I love, of course, to finish a piece and then to give it to someone knowing that I already squeezed maximum enjoyment in the making. Any further happiness on the part of the recipient is mere extravagance. There’s also a human connection: not just between me and the person I’m giving it to, but between me and the shepherds, the spinners, and the dyers too. Perhaps most of all there’s the connection to the pattern maker, who spent countless hours converting the image in their head into yarn and then paper words for me to read and then reverse the process. I don’t personally know any pattern makers. But I know pattern makers. Know what I mean?  What a remarkable thing: to be able to spend weeks inside someone else’s head without every having met them. In science fiction, there’s often some sort of machine (in Star Trek it’s a transporter) that dematerializes an object and then rematerializes them somewhere else. Sometimes knitting is like that. 

A few weeks after my orientation, I was sitting in my oncologist’s office with my husband for a pre-treament check-in with my doctor and his trusty medical transcriber. My eyes were closed and I was rubbing my fingers across my forehead. All I could think was complete darkness. Just blank. It was probably only seconds but it felt like minutes of just… nothing. Somewhere at the back of my brain, I felt there was a word or maybe a question that I was trying to retrieve. I felt the doctor and my husband waiting. The medical transcribers fingers poised on his keyboard. Finally, the doctor’s voice cut through. 

“Are you having trouble recalling words?” he asked. 

“Ya’ think?!?!” I wanted to reply back, but while the snark was there, the language to convey it was gone. 

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I had a question, but now I can’t think of it.”

The doctor reassured me that this is normal and that words would come back. What could I do but believe him?

As it had been explained to me, chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells. Ideally, this means that it wipes out cancerous cells. Realistically, hair follicles, the digestive tract, skin and immune cells can all be collateral damage. In my own way of thinking about it, while on chemotherapy, my brain also wasn’t able to form new neurons. This is how I explained the language loss to myself. Or maybe it was the stress of the whole situation. Or that my known information was being overwritten by new cancer patient vocabulary: HER negative, dexamethasone, neuropathy, taxane, and a dozen other that I realize now I never actually learned. Somewhere along the way, I decided to leave it to the doctors and nurses. My own language became much more rudimentary: sleep, pain, eat, poop. At times, I was an infant once again. I could feel people around me internally cheering when they could illicit a smile or laugh from me, just like they do with babies. 

I never did bring any knitting projects with me to chemotherapy treatments. Knitting is a relaxing pastime but it is also an act of resistance. It is all the things that modern, western society and capitalism looks down upon: feminine, slow, collective, inherited knowledge, sustainable, creative and nourishing. In our culture, it takes time, energy, and focus to maintain those types of activities. So does cancer treatment. The second months of my chemo involved Benedryl, which would usually make me sleepy, and ice packs on my hands to help prevent nerve damage to my extremities. I couldn’t have knit even if I’d had the energy to open up my WIPs and figure out where I’d left off. Besides, in the midst of all of this, it was impossible to prioritize knitting. All those years of learning and doing and making, I shoved it all to the back corner of my brain. Would I ever return to it? It didn’t matter. 

But no, there’s more to it than this. I just admitted that my language abilities are greatly diminished. And yet here I am, writing and asking you to trust me that this is all going somewhere in spite of my reduced capacities in the very medium in which we are currently communicating. Am I an unreliable narrator then? Are we all? Here. Let’s go back. I trusted the doctors to know the words necessary to eradicate the cancer. Now, I need to trust myself that I have the words to tell this story. It’s not an easy thing, trust. 

Spoiler alert: I’m knitting again. This fall, I made a charming green hat for my charming nephew. (I’d drawn his name in our family gift giving.) It’s been a pleasant little surprise each time I’ve picked up my knitting these days. It’s so easy! I remember all of it, each of the little steps from balling the yarn to casting on, checking gauge to reading a pattern. And where I’ve forgotten, there’s someone on-line or a book with the necessary information. How did this happen that I can still do all of this? I was recently doing an Old Norwegian cast on and it felt so natural that I wondered whether my ancestors from there weren’t gently working through my bones. 

The question that I had in the doctor’s office popped into my head one day. I’d wanted to ask if he thought I needed to start on the antibiotics he was prescribing right away or just have them on hand in case of infection. It turns out that he’d already explained that and my husband was there, paying attention where I could not; his brain forming neural connections while my own cells were otherwise occupied. 

And here we are, at the end of this post, ready to bind off, having sustained each other’s attention against all the odds and distractions. And still here.