Hello- BIG August 2012

We hear some amazing real-life stories from our readers.

Here’s the story of Lynette Anesbury, who used our crosswords to retrain her brain.

Lynette has been doing crosswords since she was ten. A family friend introduced her to crosswords in the paper. They started having races to see who could finish the newspaper crossword first. She used to do the cryptic crossword in The Independent newspaper, until her son bought her a Lovatts book. From then on she was hooked.

When she was 31 she was diagnosed with epilepsy. She had two kids at the time.

They operated on her temporal lobe, and had part of her brain removed, which caused her to lose her short-term memory.

When she went back to crosswords she found she couldn’t think of the answers at first. And if she did think of the answer, she found that in the few seconds it took her to look from the clue to the grid she couldn’t remember the clue number, and would have to say it aloud over and over, “seventeen across, seventeen across…etc”.

She gradually trained herself to remember, by doing our crosswords and bit by bit she was able to remember more and more. She says: “I’ve always been a word-lover and I find doing crosswords has given me my confidence back. doing crosswords and having a strong faith have been the two things that have kept me going.”

We wish Lynette all the best and thank her for sharing her story with us. We love to hear from our readers, so if any of you have stories to share, please feel free to write in.

Happy Puzzling!

CHRISTINE’S HELLO appears every month in
Christine’s BIG Crossword magazine.
» More info here