Danette’s story: sewing as therapy

Danette’s home in Hazelbrook in the Blue Mountains has bluebells carpeting the front garden and a back garden full of the family’s animals—two dogs, a curious rabbit and a cheerful cluster of contented chooks and ducks.

There’s also a large shed divided between partner Evan’s motorcycle workshop and Danette’s extraordinary collection of recycled fabrics and sewing machines. With them, she makes children’s clothing which she sells through her business, Sami Bop.

Danette first started to sew when she was 11 after her mother died of a brain haemorrhage. “Sewing is recreational therapy,” says Danette. “You get out of your body and think of nothing else.”

Danette, her older sister, Donna, and her younger brother, Scott, were born in Fremantle before the family moved to New Zealand. Her parents soon split and when their mum died and their dad remarried, Donna and Danette were sent to boarding school.

Free spirit

After school, Danette studied to be a dental nurse. She moved to Auckland and met Evan when she was 19. They’ve been together for more than 35 years. Evan does the maths: “That makes us 22 now!” he laughs.

But for free-spirited Danette, this was never going to be a settle-down-straight-away relationship. She and Donna wanted to explore their roots, so they bought an old Holden and drove across the Nullarbor to Perth.

It was the beginning of a complicated journey for Danette and Evan as they crisscrossed Australia following their separate passions—Perth, where Danette worked as a fashion-industry pattern cutter, then Geelong, where she studied fashion design, and finally to Sydney, where they settled when Evan moved there to study horticulture.

By day, Danette worked in the fashion business and by night, played drums in a 4-girl band, the Del-Emmas. They did 60s garage-band original songs from Brisbane to Melbourne and all over Sydney. Life was busy and full, but, wanting to live somewhere leafy, the couple saved to buy a house in Hazelbrook—the one they’re still in 21 years later.

In 2003, son Jasper arrived and in 2004, daughter Samara. It was when the kids were little that Danette started her Sami Bop business.

Collision

In 2013 Danette was driving home from a doctor’s appointment in Penrith. About 20 minutes from home, she blacked out and, weaving across the road, collided head-on with an oncoming car.

She was helicoptered to Westmead Hospital, where she was in ICU for two weeks with a severe traumatic brain injury, fractures, a snapped tendon in her neck and paralysed except for some movement in her right big toe.

At first, Danette wasn’t expected to live, but after titanium rods were inserted into her neck, she moved to Royal Rehab at Ryde for five months.

Slow recovery

“When I asked how long recovery would take, I felt really frustrated by the ‘how long is a piece of string?’ answer I always got. The nature of brain injury is there is no real answer, but back then, I needed hope that things WOULD get better.

“Eventually, I learned to stop asking and just get actively involved in my rehabilitation.”

Evan and the kids made the 2-hour round trip to visit her several times a week while Donna arrived from Melbourne with big-sister energy and registered-nurse skills to organise doctors and see to Danette’s needs.

“Donna and Evan are rocks to me,” says Danette, clearly still moved by their support nine years after the accident.

Slowly, Danette learned to walk and eat and the house was modified for her return. She still gets tearful remembering her first night back at home.

“Evan and I were lying in bed holding hands. We had carer support, but there was still so much to deal with. I felt overwhelmed.”

After the accident, Evan took most responsibility for the kids while support workers helped Danette around the house and with getting to appointments.

She feels the kids have missed out on a bit because her short-term memory often fails her and she couldn’t be as involved in their schooling as she had been.

The accident was difficult for the children to understand. Their normal teenage bumps have been exacerbated so that when Evan and Danette felt their “coping toolbox was empty”, they went to family counselling.

Reconstruction

After the accident, the nerves in one side of Danette’s face were severed, while the other side was compressed, leaving her without a smile. In 2019 she had an 11-hour operation to reconstruct her face and reduce her facial palsy.

“I also have problems with balance and fatigue. But I go regularly to the gym, working at my physical strength, getting facial physio and expanding my skills.”

She remains determined to make the most of every small improvement.

Danette defiantly signed up—against a doctor’s advice—for a Certificate in Community Service at TAFE. She has had support from an “entrepreneurs with disabilities” program to develop her Sami Bop business and consultations for guidance in improving online sales.

She’s also been on the steering committee for Synapse, the national brain injury organisation.

A source of much fulfilment is the work she does at The Nook, a craft cooperative in Leura. Danette has worked there since before her accident but values it even more now as a way of integrating her creative and organisational skills.

She’s also joined a ceramics group and, for this year’s Shine Arts Prize has made a gingham-patterned ceramic vase, as well as two other pieces.

“Evan and I are a real unit. We each do our own thing and then things together. That's why we’ve lasted so long.”

For all her challenges, Danette is able to say she feels lucky the accident happened when it did. “I already had a career, my kids, a business. There was so much established in my life already and I had the gung-ho to keep going.”

“Gung-ho” is a word that pops up often in Danette’s conversation.

“They say a brain injury can make you gung-ho. But I was already gung-ho. Now I’m double gung-ho.”