Each time you live through a life changing experience, you change a little, you grow and as Jo Perrott says, ‘you can’t go back to the person you were before…’
“You can’t go back to the person you were before…” Jo Perrott, founder of the now-international, Ladies Working Dog Group shares as we explore the life-halting impact of being told not only did she have a brain tumour, but that she needed a high-risk operation to remove it, within a matter of days… the first time.
In 2010, a bubbly, confident and outgoing Jo was unexpectedly diagnosed with a brain tumour, “I found out on the Friday night, had a six hour operation on the Monday to remove it and was let out six days later on Christmas Eve. I had half my hair missing, staples in my head and they effectively said, that’s it now, just get on with it…” I should add, Jo is from Wales and so, I want you to imagine her accent as we go, I can hear her endearing tone as I type.
“It felt a little like I’d mentally been run over. The shock of everything was immense and building and I was just sent home to sit there as if nothing had happened, it was mind blowing.”
Reflecting on the Jo-before, she explains how, “I was confident before, but it pretty much wiped that away. I would force the old Jo to come forward in social situations because I remembered her and how she acted. I refer to my old self as her, because I am very different now to the Jo I was.”
Describing how, “everyone thought I was fine, but I would come home, close the door and almost fold inwards,” it is clear that the effects of Jo’s traumatic experience reached far beyond the physical scars. She developed Epilepsy in the wake of her operation, which was another thing she suddenly had to deal with, “my family were understandably very scared of something happening to me,” Jo begins, “they didn’t mean to, but they almost institutionalised me. If I wasn’t with my husband, I was with my mum and dad,” admitting things got to the point that being on her own terrified her.
Following her annual scan, she was given another life altering blow, the tumour had started to grow back. Left feeling confused and frustrated she was told by her consultant that they’d monitor it and weren’t prepared to operate currently.
By 2015, five years after her initial diagnosis, Jo recalls how she could go out in public for an hour and be ‘ok’ but she’d happily never leave the house. “We’d go to Tesco and some days I couldn’t even go in.” Her family were becoming increasingly concerned by her lack of not wanting to be around people and leaving the house. Whilst to many of us that might seem like our idea of the perfect weekend, this prolonged desire to disassociate with society and ‘life’ was becoming a real problem.
This is when her Dad intervened. Jo fondly remembers how she’d hunted as a child as her father was an avid horseman and passionate huntsman. Though after two bad accidents culminating in a broken spine needing a rod inserted, he was told by his doctor his hunting on horseback days were over.
Dogs became his way of remaining rooted in the lifestyle he loved, whilst adapting to his new limitations.
Then one day her Dad rode in and saved the day! Jo explains how spaniels were in her life already as her father had been trialling them, and her daughter had been on picking up days with them, but she’d paid them little attention herself.
“Dad was watching a girl who, as a child was always outside, always active and doing stuff, suddenly not wanting to engage with the outdoors. I think he tolerated it for a certain amount of time and then he just had enough and said, ‘you’re coming out!’”
“He gave me Grace, his trailing bitch and said you’re going to go and beat and I am going picking up,” she says with a smirk as she remembers the day, “I just thought what the f***, I felt totally thrown into the deep end and I had no idea how anything on the estate worked, or what I needed to do. Luckily though, the dog knew and I basically walked behind her.”
With tears welling in her eyes, Jo shares how for the first time since being diagnosed with her tumour, she’d felt safe outdoors, in what many would class as a very unsafe environment. “I was nowhere near technology, totally disconnected from world with no signal. Watching the dog work was mesmerising for me, I couldn’t focus on what was going on in my head, because I was focusing on her.”
Continuing, she says, “I was reeling when I came back, I couldn’t wait to do it again and knew then I wanted to throw myself into it. Dad sorted out a dog called Bob for me, a five-month old Cocker Spaniel pup. I carried him in a satchel for the rest of the season whilst he was so young.”
In 2017, just as things were beginning to look more positive, Jo’s consultant changed, and with it a change of approach. Her new consultant believed in ‘getting it out as quick as I can whilst it is as small as it is,’ and so she was told to prepare for another operation in three weeks time to remove the tumour.
“I was worried all over again because I knew what recovery on the other side was like. I wouldn’t be able to walk with the dog or whistle. I’d lose my license again and with it the freedom I’d reclaimed.” Looking back on that time, Jo tells me she decided to re-home little Bob to a local beater, who still has him now.
Facing a daunting journey of recovery ahead of her, again, there was something different about this time around. Between 2015 and 2016, after discovering her love for working with her dog, she’d started a Facebook group, “there were about 7 members at the beginning!” Jo looks back with a reflective laugh, “it was a space for women to be nice to other women.”
In 2019, after launching the business, as a membership community for women with working dogs, her Dad who’d become such a key part of her recovery journey became unwell with cancer, and sadly passed away, on this Jo shares, “I valued the full days with Dad then, on the farm training the dogs. I was incredibly blessed in many ways to be able to be with him like that near the end,” thanks to the connection to the dogs he’d helped spark during her darkest days.
She explained how this, “knocked me back, and I suddenly didn’t have this person I’d run to for everything, like literally if I had a thought, I’d be like ‘Dad…’ because he’d been such a pivotal figure in my entire life.”
In 2022, yet again, Jo was told her tumour hadn’t gone away, despite her annual checkups being clear since her last operation. It turns out, it had been growing so slowly that they hadn’t been able to detect it until then.
By this point, Jo had built a business (Ladies Working Dog Group) which she could manage whilst being ‘unwell’, she mentions her PTSD had never been so bad after this latest blow. We joke and Jo comments how, “if I had a normal job I’d probably have been sacked by now because there are days when I’ve been no use to man nor beast.”
Her journey with this relentless brain tumour has taught her, as she explains in her own words, “the knocks are never going to stop coming. As human beings, we’re delusional. There will be another huge change and another that will be out of our control. You’ve got to go with it.”
We all have knocks, regardless of the size and they affect each of us. Referencing some wisdom passed on by her late-Grandmother, Jo shares something she shared with her, “if the stone is in your shoe, it hurts the same regardless of the size of the stone.”
Jo’s journey is far from over, and like many of our interviewees there is so much more to explore than can be curated in one story, and so for now we’ll leave this here on a final note…
In learning to live with the uncertainty of the future and certainty that life is too short not to embrace it, Jo has written her debut book which launches on the 6th December 2023 (just in time for Christmas!), which she describes as being, ‘very different to current gundog books available,’ based on her experience with working dogs through her late-father and work with the Ladies Working Dog Group.