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Sunday, November 26, 2006
Knitting for Peace - a guest post by Alison Hyde
Having abruptly lost part of my sight (a problem that thankfully turned out to be reversible), I was scheduled for one of those eye appointments that you know will go on and on, and I brought a knitting project on big needles for dilated eyes to be able to deal with. Note to self: next time shoot for a greater contrast between yarn and needle color, though.
Towards the end of the afternoon, the retina specialist looked at my quick lace scarf, which had grown 35" since I'd gotten there, and remarked that he had learned how to knit when he was younger. He'd done one row on a scarf. His mom hadn't ever taught him how to turn it at the end of the row, so that was all he'd done, but he was awfully proud of his one row! He struck me as suddenly quite shy in the moment he said that, as he smiled at the memory, and it wasn't till later that I put two and two together and realized he must have somehow felt he was being a complete amateur in the presence of an expert: I'd already told him about my left-eye vision loss in terms of how it had affected my knitting, that I did a lot of knitting, and (as if I needed to somehow justify that fact) that I was writing a knitting book.
How funny to have a doctor treat me as the expert. To be so shy about his pride in having learned and tried something new. It held all kinds of echoes for me of how reticent we patients can be about telling doctors, the experts who know so much more than we do about our own bodies even when they've never even met us, about our symptoms, a little afraid of being dismissed if what we say doesn't fit in the parameters of their expectations.
Hey, it's okay. We all start at the beginning. And I bet it was a great row.