October Topic: Now that your business has been operating a few years, are you doing today what you thought you would be doing when you came up with your business idea?
By Jill Vater with Jianna Studio Designs LLC
When I first started my design business after graduating college, I thought I had it all figured out. How wrong I was. You never know where or how your life can change in a heartbeat. Shortly after graduating and just starting to get my business off the ground, my world was turned upside down. I started having health issues. For over a year, I was having a constant sore throat and a raspy voice. I was finally sent to a specialist, who knew something was going on but couldn’t figure it out. That was in December. One month later in January, I went to another specialist who decided to do a biopsy. He found something but again wasn’t sure what it was. Now into February, I was sent to the Medical University where yet another specialist did another biopsy. And that’s when everything changed. I was diagnosed with ChondroSarcoma of the Larynx and was scheduled on March 12th to have my vocal cords removed.
How was I going to continue my business, raise a 13-year-old son, and learn a new way of living?
My whole world had changed forever. My mother put her life on hold and moved from New York to South Carolina to help take care of me and my son.
Little did either of us know that it would take me 3 years to recover from the surgery and the side effects. My mother and I decided it was time to leave South Carolina and move back to our hometown near family and friends. Once there I tried to keep myself preoccupied with crafting as it was very difficult for me to try to communicate and relay my design ideas to clients effectively.
When I lost my natural voice and way of speaking, I became very shy and insecure with my new voice and way of speaking. So much so, I wouldn’t talk in public for over five years.
My cousin gave me a necklace to wear to cover my stoma. She said that she wanted me to feel pretty again, and encouraged me to be confident with my new lifestyle. She said that my voice did not define who I was and encouraged me to be more vocal, not silent. And that is when I thought that if that was the way I was feeling that other women were probably feeling the same way that I was. That is when my design work had now shifted into making bead embroidered necklaces for other Laryngectomy women and concentrating on custom designs that were very specific to their needs and to help them feel confident in themselves again. I continued with that for 3 years and decided that I needed to get back into my original design work again, so I started a new design business.
