Product Feature: Hearts for Pam

But first, buckle up…this is possibly the most vulnerable blog post we ever share. Usually a very private person, Pam opens up about her medical condition for the first time and shares why she had to be the one to pack every single Hearts for Pam package. 

Now, with the job done, we sat Pam down for a quiet talk about how the last 18 months has felt:

“I couldn’t believe the response to HFP – I really couldn’t”, says Pam. “So, I decided to do the packing myself. First, because I knew I’d get so much pleasure out of doing it – just being able to stand and work – it’s such a milestone to be strong enough to do it.  And also because I wanted to appreciate, one pack at a time, just how kind people are. If somebody else at CGT packed them, then I wouldn’t have got that feeling. I found it really overwhelming, in a positive way.”  

So the last few months has involved hours of quietly packing boxes in her home studio and reflecting on the fact that every one of the boxes had been ordered by someone who wanted to support her (and CGT) when things looked tough. 

“People from all over the world, people that I don’t know and will likely never meet! I just felt so humbled by it.” she says now. “I mean, how can you really express your appreciation for that kind of support? For me, the work of packing up each kit by hand, was the best way I could think of to say thank you.”

Actually, we have to confess that when HFP was launched April – Pam had no idea it was happening. By then she’d been diagnosed with aortic stensosis and her condition was rapidly deteriorating. 

And just as well she had no idea about HFP, because Pam being Pam, if she’d realised she’d been made the centre of attention,  she’d have shut it down quick smart. 

“It was hard because it wasn’t just Mum’s health in Jeopardy, it was also the business that we had built together." Shares Katie, “The idea for Hearts for Pam came to me in the wee hours one restless night filled with worry. It came from a place of equal parts despair and hope,” recalls Katie, “very much like a philosophy that has come to be known as the Stockdale paradox that helped us a lot during covid, another tough time for our business - from the quote ‘You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.' — Admiral James Stockdale on surviving the Hanoi Hilton P.O.W camp.”

As often is the case, the seed of an idea grew over a cuppa with a friend who’s expertise is in helping businesses tell their story through social media. “My good friend Sarah from Social Grind Media helped me take a breath and detangle the emotions from the ideas to form the HFP concept and how we were going to communicate it to the stitching community” says Katie.

The response was so powerful it crashed the website several times – a present wrapped in sandpaper. Although it created a lot more admin work (some of which the team is still working through), the sales of the Hearts for Pam bundles got our business through it’s most challenging time yet. 

Pam’s medical journey started with a routine visit to the local medical clinic in August 2022. She was having difficulty sleeping and tiring easily.  Something wasn’t right. Her usual Dr wasn’t available, so she saw a visiting locum Dr who listened to Pam’s symptoms and suggested testing her heart and blood pressure. Totally routine examinations, except that the outcome wasn’t routine at all. The new Dr found something no one else had diagnosed before – a very loud heart murmur. 

More tests followed and a referral to a cardiologist, and Pam found that she’d had an bicuspid aortic valve since birth – never before diagnosed (born with two valves instead of three). She was straight on the wait list for open heart surgery – but in the meantime, inexplicably, her condition continued to deteriorate to a life threatening level and she suffered several heart attacks due to the stress that simply pumping blood was causing. Her body went into survival mode and stopped pumping blood to her extremities, focusing only on her vital organs – bringing her dangerously close to slipping into a coma and losing her life. Little did Pam know at the time, she had lost a large volume of  blood internally and would require 5 blood transfusions.   

Pam’s philosophical about the recovery journey. Anyone who has suffered acute cardiac illness knows that it carries all kinds of consequences. One of those is loss of energy and fitness. “I’m used to being someone who never got sick”, she says, and yes, Pam’s capacity for hard work was legendary – 7 days a week for hours every day. But no more. 

Another consequence which has caused Pam lots of distress – though it’s gradually reversing now -  is loss of eyesight. “It went to the point where I couldn’t see to stitch any more – so I was just sitting around – losing motivation by the day and feeling very low.” 

Cardiac illness also goes hand in hand with low mood and depression, and all the sitting around often results in chronic back pain.  Pam hasn’t been spared these either.  But she’s resolute. “When you have a business – and you can’t run the business because you’re not well enough – it’s hard”, she says. “And when you’re sitting around not doing anything and you’re a person that’s used to being active – you have a lot of time to think. Learning to pace myself has been the hardest thing of all.”

Gratitude is the thing that’s been occupying Pam’s thoughts lately. As well as gratitude for every stitcher who bought a HFP bundle or thread pack, she’s grateful to the (number) designers who gave their creativity so willingly when the chips were down. “A lot of the designers of HFP don’t know me. Sure, they know my threads, but to be willing to design pieces for me?  I’m just overwhelmed.” She’s grateful too, for the medical team who treated her. Even though her aortic valve implant won’t last forever, and she’ll be facing down the prospect of open heart surgery sometime in the future. And she’s grateful to the CGT team – “Katie and I are so very lucky that we have the team we have in order to be able to keep our business thriving”.