Читать книгу Blazing Trails of Miracles - Annette Müller - Страница 8

Darkness is a dawn just waiting to be born. Khalil Gibran

It all began with an accident. An automobile accident which demolished my little yellow Twingo. A complete write-off. I myself seemed to be unhurt. The police nevertheless called for an ambulance to take me to the nearest hospital.

On this disastrous day – the 17^th May, 2004 – I was especially cheerful. A friend from America was paying me a visit and we had deliberately chosen an Indian pub to remind us of the time we’d spent together in an Indian ashram. Several years earlier my enthusiasm for the learning of the Far East, for its yoga and meditation, had spurred me to spend some months in an ashram, a kind of monastery. And that’s where my friend and I met.

After a first-class meal in the Indian eatery, I decided to show her the beauties of Munich on that lovely May day. A short and interesting sightseeing tour.

I was the first at the Oscar-von-Miller-Ring crossroads, travelling in the direction of Obelisk. The traffic lights jumped to green and I accelerated.

That’s when it happened. A silver Mercedes comes speeding from the left, the driver is missing the red light. I step on the brake like a shot, but it is too late. I hit the limousine, which is catapulting ahead. A brief, ear-shattering bang, my car is dragged along by the Mercedes. Totally stunned, my friend and I climb out of the battered car through the passenger door.

The police, fire brigade and ambulance arrived soon after. Although I thought myself to be quite uninjured the ambulance driver insisted on talking me to the hospital. After several x-rays I was allowed to leave. It was only later that the noted diagnosis contained something that turned out to have particularly fatal consequences for my future life.

A friend picked me up. I hobbled on one leg to his car and dropped onto the seat beside him. The nurses had bandaged my very swollen foot, along with my thumb, which I’d caught in the steering wheel. My husband Günter was unable to attend to me because at that time he was seriously ill himself. My fifteen-year old daughter was at boarding school. I felt alone – and I was. One of the following days I had a bad headache, which, however, I didn’t connect with the accident.

At that time I was working in the management for our publishing company and ran a mail order business for books and exclusive gifts. I had also learnt how to paint miniatures, had dedicated myself to art and photography and had already taught yoga and meditation for several years. I’ve always lived an unconventional life and had wanted to be self-reliant and work independently right from the beginning. Günter felt and thought in a similar way to myself. We both adored travelling and loved to explore the world. We never married in a registry office; instead, we concluded our marriage in a magical wedding ceremony in India.

Our daughter was born in New York in 1989, though by the time of my accident my travelling days were far behind me. Günter had cancer, which gave us so much heartache, and that brought those beautiful long journeys to an end.

After my accident I awoke with raging headaches more and more frequently. I tried to get to grips with them through homeopathy and acupuncture, but, with few exceptions, to no avail. Every morning the same unbearable headaches, which only started to let up around noon. But worse was to come. Several months after the crash I woke up one night with such an awful headache that I felt that a grenade was about to go off in my head at any moment. I sat up, gasped for air and vomited.

An icy cold came over every limb. I was all pins and needles, as if an army of ants was marching over my body. The emergency doctor was called. He said I had migraine. I myself thought it was a serious gastrointestinal infection. After an intravenous jab I felt somewhat better and believed the nightmare to be finally over.

Eight days later, in the middle of the night, came the next attack. The same headache, the same vomiting, the same shivering fit, the same ant army scuttling and jabbing so that even my sphincter muscle caved in.

Barely conscious with pain I huddled in an embryo position in my bed. I was afraid. It wasn’t only the throbbing and burning in my head – I thought I would burst at any second – but also the juddering spasms, the cramps in the neck and shoulder muscles, the weird numbness in my hands and feet. I also had the uncanny feeling that my whole body was being assailed by some horrible poison flowing through all my veins. I wasn’t even able to groan, because every sound I uttered made the pain worse. On top of all this came the waves of coldness that flowed over me, as if someone had poured ice-cold water over my back, arms, legs and bottom. I was frozen in a glacier. And after the shock of the cold came burning heat, one wave of it after the other. It was hell, absolute hell.

The emergency doctor was called once more. He bent over me, examining me as if attempting to grasp just why I was huddled in bed bathed in sweat. My pulse was racing. The same injection, followed by a slow improvement. When I was able to think again I knew intuitively that something terrible had happened to me. But what? It was as if I had been tortured. Not by an enemy though, for it was my own body that had become an instrument of torture. I was indescribably afraid, overwhelmed by a fear of death.

In reality I’m a happy person, someone who loves life. The first serious blow in my life was Günter’s illness. He fought it, I supported him as well as I could, standing by him with all my strength and confidence. It wasn’t until the onset of my own attacks that I began to have doubts. At that time I still didn’t realise that they had anything to do with my accident.

My former positive attitude to life had flipped upside down. The world had become bleak, monochrome. Nothing added up any longer. What was more, what had happened to me had turned me into an old woman. I experienced an ever-increasing weight loss, and when I glimpsed my face in the mirror I shrank back. An old woman of at least 96 was staring back at me. “You look like one of those horrid orcs from ‘Lord of the Rings’” my daughter said, looking at me with a very anxious expression on her face. But this was no fantasy film: it was reality.

The periods of recovery between attacks become ever shorter. Periods of recovery? As far as I was concerned the phrase was a fairy tale, a cock-and-bull story. Certainly, when an attack had passed and my body relaxed during the day I endeavoured to get back to my routine. After all, what else could I do but live as if I still had before me another life as a woman, a life with my family, with friends and the usual everyday affairs? At least I attempted to lead a normal life even if I was forced finally to admit that it was impossible. The catalogue of disruptions that had wrenched control from me is so long that I scarcely feel like listing them: speech disorders, the struggle to find words, failure to maintain my balance, disturbances that affected my concentration and writing. Perhaps there were even more. When I wrote I mixed up the letters in virtually every word, while I frequently omitted several letters in every second word. Regardless of whether I wrote by longhand or typed on the computer not a single word came out perfect. Sometimes even whole words went missing. However hard I concentrated there was no sentence that was free of errors. I felt like an illiterate.

The simple attempt to concentrate failed. For the most part I was erratic and miles away in my mind. The world around me was a fathomless black hole. I didn’t know from one moment to the next what I was supposed to be doing, where I’d put my things. When I tried to concentrate on something definite, on a movement of the hand, a single task, my thoughts simply vanished into thin air and disappeared into an interminable sea of mist. I had to write down everything I wanted to do point by point. Even the slightest demand was too much for me: cooking, having a shower or getting dressed – all efforts I found nearly insurmountable.

At that time we lived in a pretty apartment in Rosenheim. I didn’t have to go far to shop and I knew a lot of people in our area. Yet suddenly I was unable to recognise faces. I crept through the neighbourhood with a kind of tunnel vision. It was only when someone I knew spoke to me that I recognised them. But now, suddenly I couldn’t think of their name - for even my memory for names had let me down. In my usual wanderings through the streets I felt like a visitor from outside that repeatedly lost her way. It was awful. My head was like a coarse mesh through which everything fell.

On one occasion I even forgot my daughter. We were at the optician’s along with our dog looking for new glasses for Anya. While she was trying on various models I went over briefly to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. And then I went straight back home. When my daughter turned up with the dog much later she was speechless. “Why didn’t you pick us up? I waited and waited! Why didn’t you come back?” I couldn’t believe it myself. How was it possible just to wipe from my mind that which I most loved? Inconceivable.

Because the attacks were determined not to let up and because I was scared to go to bed in the evening for fear that I should be awoken in the middle of the night by a new attack, only to be really relieved in the morning to find that I had awoken with “only” a raging headache, I once more embarked on my odyssey through the world of conventional medicine. Another doctor, this time a neurologist, a specialist in migraine. After several visits and comprehensive examinations he explained to me that I wasn’t suffering from migraine. He sent me to another specialist. After an examination of the cervical vertebrae and a movement MRI I received the diagnosis: dislocated atlas, dens fracture, crushed spinal cord, ruptured bands holding the uppermost cervical. These were the reasons for the pains in the night: because the muscles relaxed during sleep the bands could no longer hold the head in position, so that the dens became pressed against the spinal cord. And the reason for all these injuries? According to the doctors: the car accident, now just one year behind me. Had the collision been just a little more violent the consequence would probably have been paraplegia from the cervical spine down. And if it had been more violent still I could also have suffered a broken neck.

After the MRI imaging the doctor accompanied me to the stairs and bade me goodbye. “From now on please hold the banister firmly and make sure you find a ground-floor flat.” This sentence struck me like a bolt from the blue. My condition was going to get even worse! I didn’t dare imagine what that might mean. How was I going to get on with my life? I was already unable to meet friends, couldn’t work, because I could never know when my complaints would once more blow me off course. But one thing I did know: I was deeply traumatised. I still refused to give up, nevertheless. I underwent one physiotherapy treatment after another until, after some time, my physical condition did indeed improve and the pains abated.

For a time I became hopeful. But this proved, alas, to be illusionary. The attacks didn’t let up, the doctors appeared to have given up on me. I felt like a stranger, dogged by misfortune and robbed of her place in the world.

As if stalked by bad luck I was struck a further blow: the doctor who had examined me immediately after the accident had written that I was only partially unable to work. I tried to claim damages from the other party’s accident insurance, but every attempt failed. I found myself confronted with a sophisticated system, a covey of cronies made up of lawyers, physicians, insurances, shareholders and many others. These people had one interest, and one interest only: to make a profit. Countless people and institutions made money from my accident and its consequences. My private health insurance alone earned a lump sum for damages on the costs resulting from “my injuries” – an enormous amount. So my health insurance reaped rewards from my accident while I came away with nothing. I had also still to pay huge sums myself for essential physiotherapeutic treatment since my insurance – precisely the insurance which had made money from me – refused to assume the costs involved, reasoning that therapy was medically unnecessary. As a result of these circumstances I was forced to battle with financial worries on top of everything else.

I was not surprised that my condition was noticeably deteriorating. The nightly headaches persisted until two or three o’clock in the afternoon. I swallowed tablet after tablet, but with very little to show for it. I stopped driving, rarely left the house. Now for the first time in my life I could understand people who chose suicide rather than continue bearing intolerable pain.

Then came the change. It was very slow, but it came. My mother had urged me more than once to visit a spiritual healer. I didn’t believe in such a wishy-washy thing as spiritual healing: the whole business was a nice fad, nothing more. Just imagination, superstition, some kind of hocus-pocus. Should I, if possible, make a trip to the Brazilian jungle or to the Himalayas? Apart from that I couldn’t believe that anyone could help me. But my mother continued to insist. She recommended a healer, one I absolutely had to pay a visit to.