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Illustration by Christine Wei
When I was 20, or thereabouts, I spent six weeks flat on my back in Vancouver General Hospital’s Centennial Pavilion. Out of the blue, I had been stricken with acute pain. My entire back was in severe and constant painful spasm.
It took a week, many x-rays, blood tests and a spinal fluid tap to identify the cause of the excruciating pain as an infection in the disk space between two lumbar vertebrae. The bacterial culprit was never cultured in the laboratory but was presumed to be blood-borne Staphylococcus aureus. I was placed in a body cast and given injectable penicillin, which was so viscous as to be more like a paste than a liquid. The syringes and needles were gigantic, rendering the procedure painful. So, there I was, essentially immobilized for weeks, surviving mostly on morphine. I was to learn in medical school years later that my chance of surviving such an infection was less than 50 per cent.
I got bored pretty quickly. There’s not much to see on the ceiling of a hospital room. You can count the tiny holes in the white acoustic tile but that’s soul destroying, especially if the narcotics make you lose count and you have to start over. I needed an alternative to reading and, for whatever reason, knitting came to mind. My mother brought along two long, fairly thick knitting needles and several balls of attractive dark red and black wool, plus a pattern for a heavy crew-necked sweater.
The first problem was that, lying supine, you can see what’s above you, but not what’s in front of you. A cardiac surgeon lent me some unusual spectacles which, instead of having two regular flat lenses, had two small right-angle prisms. When you looked up, you looked down your front. Very clever. The next issue was with the needles. It was impossible to hold them freely and still manipulate the tips and wool. The wool would annoyingly leave the needles, unravel, and fall away. I discovered that, if I held the needles firmly in my armpits, I could knit with relative ease. While it took some doing, I learned the so-called stocking stitch, which means alternately knitting one row then purling the next.
My boredom dissolved overnight, only to be replaced by embarrassment. I mean, what is a 20-year-old man doing knitting? Whenever I sensed someone was entering my room (I couldn’t see the door from my bed) I stashed the gear beneath the bedclothes. That worked well until the day I left one of the needles sticking out from under a blanket. A nurse came in, saw it, and hauled everything out. I was mortified, until she mentioned that on the ninth floor there was also a young man, a logger, who was doing petit point.
Once out in the open, my project began to resemble Tom Sawyer’s fence – when he convinced others to help him paint the fence by pretending it was so much fun. First to come along and take a look at my knitting was a surgeon from the Orthopedic department, a Fellow of the Royal College. He asked if he could look at my work, so I handed him everything, needles, wool and a half-finished sleeve. Settling onto my bed, he gently lifted the needles, glanced at the pattern, and rapidly knitted three rows with perfect tension. It turned out that, as a poor farmer’s son in Korea, he had had to knit his own socks. He was actually used to working with three needles.
Then another physician showed me he could knit, although not as well as the first doctor. At least three nurses gave the needles a whirl, one of whom knit with her eyes closed. Another used astonishingly little hand movement. The only finger that seemed to move was the index finger of her right hand which twitched up and down as regularly as a metronome. Her left hand was only used to clutch the dozen or so most recent stitches and draw them down the needle out of the way.
The kicker, though, was the nurse who noticed an irregularity in my work. About 10 rows down there was a small hole. “You’ve dropped a stitch,” she said. “How did you do that?” “Search me,” I replied. With that, she took the needles and somehow reached down and magically picked up the lost stitch and closed the hole. Then, after jabbing my backside with a load of penicillin, she said cheerfully, “If you need more help, just tug on your emergency buzzer cord.”
It took six months of wearing the body cast and taking oral ampicillin to recover, so I effectively lost a year, but I wore the sweater long afterward. Once in a while, someone would ask where I bought it. Of course, they didn’t believe me when I told them its origin. That is, until I showed them the back where, about two inches from the bottom edge on the right-hand side, there was a four-inch-long ridge where, instead of knit-one purl-one row by row, it went knit-one purl-one stitch by stitch in the same row. I blamed it on the morphine.
John P. Whitelaw lived in Nanaimo, B.C., this essay was submitted by his wife, Christine Whitelaw.
