Three-time award-winning author, John Walker Pattison calls himself a dreamer. Born on Monday, 4th February 1957 to parents John and Ruby in the wonderful seaside town of South Shields – he admits that he spent his school days clowning around, neglecting his intellectual chemistry, leaving school with a handful of worthless qualifications.
His childhood was uneventful, although one of his early recollections is from September 1969 when he made his first entry through the turnstiles at St. James Park to see his beloved Newcastle United play football. In 1973, he started to work in a local shipyard until the spectre of cancer gripped his life in a deathly stranglehold and sculptured his future. It was then that his parents were told that he would not survive. Today, he is humbled to be one of the longest survivors of cancer in the UK.
Eight years after his unexpected recovery, he would be devastated by the news that his four-year-old daughter, Donna, had terminal leukaemia. But, like her father, she too would defy the odds, going on to become an international swimmer for Team GB.
Pattison left the Shipyards in 1985 and returned to college where more mature, he excelled and gained the requisite qualifications that would take him into nursing where he enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top of the nursing ladder. During his nursing career, he wrote dozens of articles for national and international nursing and medical press and presented lectures the length and breadth of the country on many aspects of haematology and cancer management. He is honoured to have won numerous awards both locally and nationally for his work in haematology and oncology. However, Pattison knows that being one of the longest cancer survivors is, without doubt, his greatest achievement.
He retired from his post as a senior clinical nurse specialist and head of service in haematology at his local hospital, partially due to chronic illnesses as a consequence of the salubrious chemotherapy and radiotherapy he received almost fifty years ago. There is little doubt that the crucial hinge in John’s life is his beautiful wife, June. “…Nothing is more important than family…” says John.
In 2022, Pattison published his memoirs, ‘Me, and My Shadow – memoirs of a cancer survivor’ to great acclaim. The aim was to deliver hope and particularly inspiration to anyone touched by a cancer diagnosis.
John Walker Pattison has always been an elasticated Grandpa, telling his grandchildren exaggerated tales of adventure. But when, in 2019, cancer stuck him once again, it was these adventures that would allow him to become an author of children’s fiction – inspired by Daniel, his youngest grandson and best friend.
The music of Hawkwind presented him with his first inspiration during his dark days of the seventies – and in 2007 he would not only join the band as part of the backstage crew, he would play on stage with the band at Donnington Festival.
However, a greater inspiration and influence in his life was the history and spirituality of the Lakota Sioux Nation. In 2018, he spent time on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with the indigenous people of South Dakota, the people who, unknowingly, supported him through life's greatest challenge — cancer.
Pattison enjoys the solitude and escapism of fly-fishing, but, there is nothing greater than travelling to secluded and undiscovered areas of America with his soul mate, June.
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