A true gem
Sarah Gardner can’t exactly pinpoint the moment she started feeling things weren’t quite right in her body. It was during the lengthy COVID lockdown period and she attributed her fatigue, migraines and other odd symptoms to the stress of running a busy business during a rapidly unfolding pandemic.
But after a bout of pneumonia saw her hospitalised, her blood test results began concerning doctors. And after 10 long months of testing, retesting and shuffling between specialists, a diagnosis was finally found: Gardner had a rare, progressive and incurable form of blood cancer.
“I will always remember the day my GP called me,” she tells Local Paddo over coffee at Alimentari, neighbouring her eponymous William St jewellery store.
“When she rang me I had totally forgotten I had even done the latest blood tests. She said I wasn’t to use Google and that I needed to see a haematologist straight away. I left work and I walked home. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I just left. I was sobbing.”
The type of blood cancer Gardner has is known as myeloproliferative neoplasms (or MPN). The variant Gardner has is so rare that little is known about it, and there are few specialists in the area. Treatment largely aims to curb the progress of the condition.
“When I first heard the word ‘incurable’ I thought, ‘This is it, I have a year or a couple of years left’,” she says. “It was devastating.”
At length, though, Gardner learned it is possible to live with the condition, especially if she can manage to keep it at bay for as long as possible before the symptoms begin to affect her quality of life.
“I have always been a machine at work, so the hardest part for me has been slowing down,” she says. “98% of the time I handle it pretty amazingly but the other 2% of the time is not that great.”
Despite the life setback, and the difficulty of sharing the news with her seven-year-old daughter, Rose, Gardner has been determined to carry on. Apart from managing her symptoms through increased rest and looking after herself, she has also found deep satisfaction in watching her professional life flourish.
Having started as an apprentice jeweller as a teenager, she has clocked up almost three decades in the jewellery business — and now the business is about to shine on the international stage. Buyers from New York have been knocking on her door and in October she will start selling her unique pieces in both the US and Europe.
“I’m very excited about the business,” she says. “We have a lot of exciting things going on and I have a feeling we are going to go very well in America.”
Gardner says there is a culture of jewellery buying in the US and Europe that doesn’t necessarily exist in Australia, with people in those cultures putting away money each year for new pieces.
“Traditionally, people in Australia haven’t spent money on jewellery; they spend money on houses and holidays instead,” she says. “Most people have an engagement ring and that might be it. But in America, people budget for jewellery. I think Americans will enjoy the fact that we are offering something different to anything else that’s around.”
Gardner’s pieces, all handmade in Paddington, feature unique Australian stones including black opals and other colourful gemstones such as aquamarines, peridots, peach tourmalines and yellow and purple sapphires. Her rings, necklaces, earrings and bracelets often place together unusual shapes and combinations to startlingly beautiful effect. Her heart-shaped opal rings, surrounded by tiny pretty gemstones, are particular favourites of romantics.
“Our theme is ‘perfectly imperfect’ and our pieces are made to last a generation,” she says. “I think one of the things that has made us successful is that there are a lot of self-taught jewellers out there, especially on social media. But without the technical skills behind that, pieces won’t last. We have this back story of 29 years of expertise behind what we do.”
She is also focused on raising funds for research into curing and treating obscure blood cancers. A fundraiser she organised last year raised $140,000 for research and another event is planned for this year.
“There’s very little research into these blood cancers so we want to do as much as we can do to change that,” Gardner says.
September was blood cancer awareness month. Look out for Sarah’s activations to raise funds for blood cancer research on her Instagram feed @sarahgardnerjewellery
Sarah Gardner Fine Jewellery
88 William St