Читать книгу The Healer Within - Mariena Foley - Страница 5

“If you’re going through Hell, keep going.” –Winston Churchill

I don’t remember a lot of the details about my grandfather. I don’t recall a lot of the incidental day-to-day stuff. But I do clearly remember, knowing him so very well, as I have felt it all my life. I was his eleventh grandchild and six years old when he died.

Shortly before his death I was sitting on his lap, amid the colourful multidirectional banter of an extended family gathering. I was leaning back onto his chest chatting to him, just so he would answer me and I could feel that great rumble of a voice rolling out of that great mountain of a man. My absolute love and admiration for Popa was full and intense, and even at the age of six I would consciously allow it to envelop me in its ecstasy.

Nearly all of my relatives were somewhat dumbfounded by me, and as such I was the proverbial “black sheep” and always a “naughty little girl.” But I was a pretty girl with blonde curls and blue eyes, so they loved showing me off—provided I didn’t speak or do anything “weird.” I was always kept under close restraint, particularly in public, but not by my Popa; he just loved me.

At a gathering only a few years ago, many years after the event, my older cousin recounted to me the conversation I had with Popa that afternoon, upon his lap. He recalled the tears running down Popa’s cheeks when I answered.

Popa rumbled, “Lissy, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

And I said, “Wise.”

I remember saying it. I remember Pop’s silence, for it made me turn to look at him and bask in his gentle smile. My cousin tells me it was a rare day when he wasn’t astonished by me, but on this day I actually silenced the entire family. I can still see the dismayed heads shaking.

Weeks later, I was at school, playing in the playground at recess, when for no reason I knew at all I burst into tears. When the teacher came over and asked, “What is it, Melissa?” I replied, “My Popa just died.” She stared at me hard for a moment, then rolled her exasperated eyes and walked away.

I sat down on a bench, desolate and alone beneath the stark branches of a winter tree. My friends were playing around me but knew not to come to me. I remember feeling within myself that somehow, I had made the wrong choice. When my parents picked me up from school that afternoon they told me that Popa had died, indeed at 10:47am, while I was at recess. I said, “I know.” Of course, I was punished for being unfeeling and ill-mannered.

My childhood was not easy. And I was not an easy child. I’m certainly not proud of that fact, but I do forgive myself now that I am a little wiser.

The truth is, I didn’t really want to talk about myself in his book. It was a friend working in healing who convinced me. He said, “Melissa, who better to help someone that ails than someone who has been to hell and back, and then gone back a few times just to see if the climate has changed?”

As a child, the confusion was very real. I just could not comprehend the need or the rush of people to conform. Actually, I still don’t. Norman Vincent Peale seems to understand and put it concisely: “Conformity is one of the most fundamental dishonesties of all. When we reject our specialness, when we water down our God-given uniqueness and individuality, we begin to lose our freedom. The conformist is in no way a free man. He has to follow the herd.”

Almost thirty years into this life, I finally came to recognize that I don’t think like other people and they don’t think like me. My expectations of myself have not really softened at all, but in this discovery, I am far more generous, patient and indulgent in my expectations of others.

I am an Indigo child. When I read The Indigo Children by Jan Tober and Lee Carroll, I experienced two things: recognition and relief. Not only did someone understand that I didn’t think like other people think and didn’t seem to have the same social filters, but also the specialists referenced in the book actually saw merit to this! If you understand or have read about Indigos, then you’ll be able to laugh at, and comprehend somewhat, the audacious existence that has been, and is, my life.

Of course, it would have been a lot easier if during my childhood we recognised Indigo children and their differing natures. But my mother was blind in the wilderness to this strangely independent, very strong and apparently defiant child, a child who knew change was necessary and always pushed to make it. She was told to “discipline her,” and when that didn’t work, “discipline her harder.”

I appeared awkward, I was painfully shy, and the majority of my family just couldn’t fathom how to communicate with me. And I couldn’t fathom how to get through to them, either! I threw tantrums that to this day, only my own children can compete with (sadly for them, as they are dealing with the master). I was grotesquely intolerant of idiots, but rather than let them know it, I simply went within myself. Just didn’t answer. I see my son do the same thing now. My son has a physical disability and people, not knowing, assume it must be something to do with his disability. Having been there myself, I see him just choose not to bother himself with such small questions. He, too, just goes within.

Not unhappily intrinsic, either. It was (and still is) blissful to escape within and concentrate on the incredible influx of information that I gathered throughout the day from moment to moment. It was enjoyable to filter, refine, comprehend a little further or abandon information from various interactive and even multidimensional information feeds. A whole separate adventure lives within our own minds.

I used to, and actually still do, love watching people. I often recall looking at a group of people that I was amongst, from a distance. I could make myself be outside that group when physically I was amid them. I could view a moving kaleidoscopic portrait of them, and I would watch. And smile. And learn.

It wasn’t an easy childhood, and a bevy of forces were at work at any moment to assure that status. Bad things happened. Bad things. Any single one of these things could have created a victim of me. My apparent social ineptitude made me ill equipped to handle them. Remaining intrinsic, for me, was a defensive action in the face of the mind-chattering chaos of absorbing all the peripherals, as well as dealing with the obvious.

This absorbed, non-communicative existence prompted me to hear the phrase, “The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know!” more times than I care to remember. Every child hears this phrase at some time. I had it hammered in. However, it actually wasn’t self-absorption; it was an quiet essential for survival.

The downfall of my silent defensive strategy came to a head when I started school. Apparently I hadn’t been openly communicating much at all. Despite the fact that an extraordinary amount of activity was always going on within me, I hadn’t actually shared a lot of it. As such, when I was at the appropriate age to start school, my mother had placed me in a remedial prep class, as they had come to the conclusion that I had some sort of learning disability. I was only in the Prep class for two days before the school put me into Grade Two.

I had been reading since I was three, only Mum hadn’t noticed. I certainly hadn’t told anyone. Having to speak to people was horribly uncomfortable, and did I mention I was painfully shy? I have an extraordinary memory, a true gift that means learning comes easily. (When we meet, this is worth remembering, for my memory is long.) Again, in my naiveté, I had assumed everyone shared this. But alas…

The self-discipline to sit down and study was another issue. You would have hated me at school, not studying, getting good grades. But I was so bored and frustrated and despised being there. Unless I knew I would enjoy the task, I simply refused to complete any assigned homework, and in the face of this my marks did suffer. Homework seemed a pointless exercise of little benefit to any party involved, other than to tax one’s time.

I did everything extra curricula that I could during school, to stem the boredom and quash the frustration I had at such an inefficient and ineffective institutional system. As such, I play a number of musical instruments, speak various languages, etc. The number of rehearsals I attended for jazz ensemble, orchestra, senior band and various types of dance, not to mention sports, rivalled the entire number of scheduled school classes I had. I was eleven years old when I developed a plan that would make general education less generic and more effective for the individual. I couldn’t understand why the school faculty wouldn’t listen, although I do recall the principal saying, “There’s something wrong with that girl!” as I left his office.

(I recommend reading The Indigo Children by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. This weird existence will make a lot more sense, and you’ll know me a lot better. There are many, many written titles on the topic but still I find this particular title a great introduction.)

Yep, I was the “troublemaker”. Not intentionally, but I was certainly perceived as such by the strict faculty at the Catholic school I attended. “Triple F”, Father Fred Franklin, the principal of the school, belonged to an order of brothers that had only run all-boy schools. This was their first co-ed school and he was simply bewildered by me. In a Year Eight report card, my maths teacher wrote, “Melissa has incredible potential. The rest of the class might have too, if she would stop talking to them all throughout the lessons!”

Ultimately I became the school captain. Poor old Father Fred was stuck with me for a whole year. Clearly, everyone enjoyed watching this poor man’s tortured struggle!

My final year in high school was a nightmare. Most people did five Higher School Certificate subjects in their final year. Because I could, and they were trying to keep me busy, I did four the previous year and another six in my final year: ten math/ science subjects because, according to my teachers, that would “take me further”.

School started in February, and one week in, I was diagnosed with glandular fever. A month later, I was raped by a young man who apparently had been stalking me for some time (you learn that in hindsight, of course). In April I was diagnosed with Ross River virus, which is quite similar to glandular fever, except it also feels like you have hot sand in all of your joints. I wasn’t well. I was sleeping 14–16 hours a day, just trying to stay alive. School took up all the rest of my time, and what a waste of time it felt like.

Aside from the emotional hurt, I sustained significant physical injuries from the rape. This guy had planned the whole thing for months, so he was pretty organised in its execution and ultimately tried to kill me with a piece of wood, through the end of which he’d hammered nails.

In Australia, if you suffer trauma or serious illness during your final year at school, they can give you “special consideration”, which gives some official room for excuse if your marks aren’t too hot. A guidance teacher recommended I apply for it. I was rejected because the rape “didn’t occur during an examination period”. As for the illness, well, I might get over it before the end of the year.

Regardless, I graduated and got a university scholarship into engineering. Great course; just not for me. I was so sick of memorising formulae. For the first time, I seriously addressed my career. I had never actually given any thought to what I wanted to do with my life. When I had had that all-important appointment with a guidance teacher and she asked me what I wanted to do when I left school, I answered, “Nothing.” These days I’m inclined to think that it was the correct answer. Nothing can be very pleasant, provided money is not an issue.

But I was cruising. I was following the script, the expectations of others. Damn it, I was conforming! Conforming, because it was easier than identifying where I needed to go. I left engineering and after a stack of research, decided I wanted to do a business degree in marketing. Despite my high marks, they wouldn’t let me into the course because all of my subjects had been math/science. (Pffft! “Take me further”, right!)

I decided to revert to that Latin proverb: “If there is no wind, row.”

So I landed in the waiting room of the Dean’s office in the Marketing Department, prepared to argue my case. He was too busy, he couldn’t see me. So I camped there. I would watch as he walked in and out, calling to me as he passed, although careful not to make eye contact, “No, no, I have an appointment,” or “No, I told you my schedule is full!” On the fourth day, he walked out of his office and with a resigned look said, “Melissa, you have five minutes.” We both knew the decision before I’d even entered his office. I started my Bachelor of Business-Marketing the very next day.

Later that year I was diagnosed with uterine cancer.

As you do with such diagnosis, I went into a state of shock and despair for a couple of days. When I saw the oncologist and they began talking about treatment, one thing became evident: I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I knew I needed to know more about what was happening

This time I went to the Dean of Science at the University. It was a lot easier to convince him as a nineteen-year-old with cancer. He customized a science course in human anatomy/ physiology for me, no doubt specially tailored to help me comprehend my own physical predicament. And there I was, doing a double degree.

I loved it! Just loved it. All my life I have had an affinity with the human body; I could sketch it, sculpt it, paint it, and convince my own to do any number of athletics: gymnastics, dance, you name it. I loved the simplicity in its symmetry, yet its utter complexity in symbiotic function.

All my life I have pushed this body of mine. Being tall and muscular, I have always loved the myriad sensations of movement, exertion, total relaxation, stretching muscles, even the muscle soreness of overexertion. So yes, I was and still am athletic.

As a child, and even more so as a teenager, I was alarmingly, or as my mother put it, “embarrassingly” thin. I ate all the time. No eating disorders, nothing like that; just a phenomenal metabolism and huge energy levels. I have always physically “moved” and it has always been my salvation. Even now I weight train and run between five and seven kilometres, several times a week. I joke that it’s my stress management, but really it’s no joke. I was only twelve or thirteen when I came to understand that if I didn’t get rid of this excessive, pent-up energy, it would get ugly. Or rather, I would get ugly. So I use it, and with each footfall, I pound the stress into the pavement.

When I was diagnosed with cancer for the first time, I started to train specifically. In all the sports and dance I had done, I had never trained “sport specific” because I was never just involved in one sport. With cancer, I entered the singular sport of survival. I would be at the gym, listening to people’s petty bitching about how someone else looked or acted. A lot of these people were in dire need of an altered perspective! I recall one lady, when her trainer asked her what she wanted to look like, pointing at me and saying, “I want to look like her.” I thought, Oh no you don’t!

Even at my sickest moments with cancer, when the pain and the utter exhaustion were unbearable, I had it in my head that if I moved, I would survive. As long as this body was still in motion, I would survive.

Every day I made sure I did something physical. There were days when all I could endure was to go from my apartment to the mailbox and back. Each step was agonising, firing hot shots of nausea up my throat. Rushes of fever would leave me lathered in sweat. I would finally fall back in the front door of my apartment, wallow in self-pity for a few minutes, then get on with life…because I still could. I was still moving.

Under the direction of my doctor, a brilliant guy who had been a bit of a Doogie Howser, I underwent the usual medical treatments associated with cancer. He had flown through school in record time and started university at fifteen or so. When I met Greg as my doctor prior to cancer, we had become friends. Instinctually this felt wrong, and no doubt professionally it was, but I loved his company. He was enormously charming. Although it was clear that I wasn’t quite getting the full picture, it didn’t worry me at the time. We had the best time together, going to major sporting events, dinners and shows at the expense of the drug companies that wanted Greg’s business.

In a short space of time, it became clear that the treatments I had been scheduled for weren’t working and the cancer was spreading. When Greg said, “We are going to try something new”, I never imagined my friend would put me at risk. He put me on an experimental drug, which I took for two days and then was bedridden for three weeks. Greg got a brand new sports car about a week after I went on this drug. Strangely coincidentally, it never cost me a cent to be on this drug.

After this I had had enough. I put a stop to it all.

I was grey, skeletal and completely bald, not an eyelash to my name. I felt utterly stripped and devoid. I couldn’t eat, though that didn’t seem to affect my ability to vomit. My stomach responded to filtered water as though it was curdled milk. The only relief I had at this time was when I closed my eyes; for some reason I felt cooler, safer, calmer. Everything else burned, ached and stung. The chemotherapy left my very veins feeling scraped and charred. You know that feeling you have, when you’ve spent all night next to a campfire and you can feel that grotty charred sensation in every pore? Well, that was what I felt like on the inside. Bizarrely, I had extraordinary insight into the internal trauma of my battle-raged body.

I refused treatment. The oncologist was peeved. He said, “At best, you’ve got two weeks.”

Two weeks to live. Two weeks. I was twenty years old.

I phoned my parents and told them I had cancer. This probably seems strange, but as I lived alone and some distance from them, I didn’t want them to worry; I just wanted to get on with the job of getting over this cancer. Actually, I didn’t tell many people about it because I couldn’t tolerate their pity. And I couldn’t help them in their distress; I just didn’t have the energy. They were so angry! But I just didn’t have it in me…I had to focus on surviving.

So I locked myself in my apartment with my cat, Rhubarb, and lay down awaiting death. Somewhere on the second day, I thought, “I don’t feel like I’m dying.” I wasn’t well. I felt like crap, my body was wasted away, simply breathing was painful…but I wasn’t dying. Perhaps that was more the core reason why I didn’t tell my family or many of my friends; I knew, within, that this would end and I would still be here. So I got up and got on with life.

I can’t explain it, and now I know that it actually doesn’t require explanation. The fact that I am still here is enough. My body healed itself.

Within a year I was cancer free.

But the damage was evident. My body was wasted down to its very base elements and felt truly foreign to me. I had no strength, restricted movement, little stamina and no appetite. Out walking one day, I tried to race a friend in a sprint up a hill. He laughed triumphantly when he got to the top and turned to find I had barely moved from where he left me. He joked, calling me “slack”and ‘slow”, but what he didn’t realise is that I had given it everything I had! There was just nothing there. This was a shattering revelation. My body had forgotten me! It was not unlike getting into a cab in a foreign country and finding the driver doesn’t speak English. We were going nowhere until I could communicate with this body again.

So the very first body I rehabilitated was my own, sculpted and rebuilt from the wastelands of terminal disease. It was hard work and felt agonisingly slow, but in reality, in a matter of months, I had discovered a body purpose-built for living.

I was still studying at university and was now paying my way through school by teaching aerobics classes (I had found a way to combine rehabilitation and earning). Leading sixteen to eighteen classes a week, my body was strong, muscular, capable and I loved the way it felt again! I was ready for a new challenge.

So I applied to enter the army. Of course, what else does a young girl do? I wanted to go in at general entry, as I admired the character at that level. Instead, with my evident education, they put me in for Officer Training, necessitating almost a year of psych tests, medicals (I’ll get back to that), exams, hearing tests, the lot. Out of 1200 applicants, sixty got in and only three were women. I was one of the three.

I left you hanging about my doctor, Greg, “doing me harm”. It turned out that Greg had some pretty serious issues, I’m afraid. Allegedly, Greg had been having sex with his patients in his rooms and charging the time to Medicare. What was worse, he was HIV positive, as now are many of the men he’d had sex with. While I’d known him he had married and had a daughter; thankfully, both his wife and daughter are not HIV positive. As you can well imagine, when all of this came to light my shock was miniscule compared to the shock his wife experienced. He had also, in his incredibly charistmatic and charming way, convinced many of his elderly clients to leave their millions to him…and the list goes on. He’s now jailed, having been charged with many crimes, including millions of dollars of Medicare fraud. I had been quite the “beard” for my doctor!

No doubt because he was covering his tracks, my medical records disappeared. That is no mean feat, I tell you, and it wasn’t just mine alone. Many of his patients have had to deal with this. These records were removed from a number of databases. It’s never been a convenient thing, I might add. The only medical records I have left are of a tonsillectomy I had at eighteen. However, this worked well when I was entering the military.

I was in the army now.

My mother was horrified, the relatives disbelieving; my father, however, having been in the army himself, said “It will be the making of you.“ He was so right! It was some of the best times and some of the worst times I can recall.

I had no expectations except that it would be hard. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed it so much; every day I was pushed to my limit and then beyond, so every day I had a hugely empowering sense of accomplishment. Even today I live very much by the Infantry corps motto: “Improvise, Adapt and Overcome”.

I later found out that during my basic training, there was a huge betting pool on how long I would stay in; the longest bet was three weeks. Probably because of my physical appearance, people have a habit of grossly underestimating me.

It wasn’t long before my fellow recruits figured that out. The guys later confessed that I pushed them all, because I would whip them on the obstacle course, on the firing range, and tactically. We would run at a 10-foot wall and I would make it over first time, one-handed, rifle slung. You can imagine the male ego response to that.

And it was that male ego thing, too, that created some of my worst moments in the army.

Early on it was discovered that I had a talent with weapons. I have a dead eye when shooting and a love for the mechanism of the weapons we used. My first love was rifles and individual automatic weapons. No need to worry, it’s not some demented, crazed obsession. The military ensures that not only are you proficient in handling the weapon, but that you revere it and handle it with the utmost respect.

As time came for me to choose a corps, I wanted to go into armoured; tanks, etc. I mean, why carry the weapon when the weapon can carry you? That, and I loved the sound of the 30 cal and 50 cal guns; beautiful. But justifiably, women aren’t allowed in armoured. We aren’t allowed in infantry either, but that is the corps I entered.

I think my father was right. I saw so many great guys grow into great men in the military. And I’m sure it was the “making of me” too. I made some awesome friendships whilst in the military that last to this day, and could tell you a thousand hysterically funny “war stories” about our service, training and exercises, that to this day have tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.

It was a truly amazing time. But I had to leave…

Something strange started happening with my balance. One moment I would be standing up straight and then, without any sensation of overbalance at all, I would be lying on the ground. I had headaches, nose bleeds, a weird pressure in the back of my throat and a strange taste in my mouth. They thought it was extreme fatigue and sent me to the Regimental Medical Officer. He did tests, blood counts, a CT and MRI.

Brain Tumour

They gave me the option: take a medical discharge, or take leave and “deal with it”. I chose the latter. But the news wasn’t good. The tumour was inoperable. This time I was given twelve months to live.

The death sentence, again.

Many people must simply give up when they hear that. You trust your doctor. We’ve been conditioned to do so. You believe what he says to you! So where does that leave your mindset?

The fight wasn’t going well. There is nothing quite the same as the feeling of your own brain deceiving you. There was a pinnacle day when I went to walk out the door of my apartment down into the courtyard, an automatic process I had never had to think about. I fell, badly, landing hard on the pavers. There were three steps down to the yard and my body could not remember how to walk down them. Determined, damn stubborn in fact, I would not let this tumour win, so I kept trying. Again and again. Cognitively, deliberately, battered and bleeding…and I kept falling.

Three months later at a “routine” check-up with he specialists, they changed their minds. “You’ve probably only got six months.”

I joked, “What if I’m on a schedule here? You just stripped me of three months!” But I was the only one laughing. “I’m sorry”, they said.

I wasn’t sorry. I was angry. And as I’m an Indigo, I was really angry. I began to have blackouts, and when I would come to, the pain was absolutely horrendous. I would crawl very, very slowly, with my head hanging low between my arms, to a place where I could rest comfortably, then sleep and sleep.

I was rapidly entering depression and had started to think self-pitying thoughts like, Is everyone else’s life this bloody hard? I went home to my family for Christmas that year and could barely crack a smile. Then an amazing gift was put before me…

A friend with whom I went to primary school rumbled down our driveway on his Harley Davidson one day. I hadn’t seen him for eleven years. He’d heard I was in town and thought he’d drop in. We spent the next couple of weeks purring our way around the beautiful Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria on the Harley. It was summer, dappled light, warm salty breezes, the freedom of the bike: just exquisite.

One afternoon my friend said, “Let’s go rollerblading. I know this guy who is a great skater, we’ll go with him. I’ll meet you at 8 pm down at Lakes Entrance…”

So at 8 pm I drove into the driveway and stepped out of the car into destiny’s play. The skater friend was remarkably articulate, obviously intelligent, warm and very, very funny.

I was not interested in any sort of romance. I was absolutely not looking. After all, I had no future. So of course, that is when I met a friend who for a chapter would become my husband. I had known him only two days and can remember the very moment when I knew I was going to marry him. I was halfway across a street, between the traffic lanes, when it hit me. I nearly got run over in my shock!

My health started getting better. As it turns out, and as can happen with illness, it was a great time for me to slow down and re-evaluate things. From the outset, for as long as I could remember, I had been in a hurry. I had to achieve this, try that, beat that system, go there, and in all things, I had to excel. I expected no less of myself. But I had been so busy achieving that I had not actually been enjoying my achievements. And I still hadn’t discovered where I really wanted to go.

Throughout it all, I was driven. I knew there was purpose, but as yet, not what it was.

Somehow, against all odds, I started to recover, although it didn’t feel like it. Friends witnessed me blacking out and vomiting. I would be on the floor when I regained consciousness and my husband would be lying next to me, his face inches from mine, wet with tears, his brow furrowed with such concern.

Andrew had a wickedly fast sense of humour and a wonderful ability to speak to anyone and make them feel like he was an old friend. His humour was intelligent, yet comfortable. At a time when I could barely crack a smile, what with a death sentence upon me, depression and a tumour, he had me laughing nonstop.

We had only known each other for eleven months when we were married. No one said to me, “Are you sure? You don’t think it’s all a bit fast?” Years later, when I asked my father about it, he said, “When I saw the two of you together, there was no doubt it was meant to be.”

Looking back, I should have added a disclaimer on the marriage certificate. Andrew entered an existence that was, in a word, big. My life: never dull and often exhausting. Kryon, in the book The End Times, refers to certain karmic groups, rated according to the nature of karmic activity. He numbered these groups from high to low: 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10. I was clearly in group 1-3, with a massive amount of fairly brutal lessons thrown at me constantly, in linear time, always overlapping, causing me to appear to others as the perpetual victim. Life just kept happening around and to me, and friends would say, “How can so much happen in one person’s life?”

I am not, now and have never been a victim. Not in my mind. Not in my heart. That is probably the sole reason I still survive.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”.

Only a couple of months after the stalker got away with raping me and while I was still at school, he raped another girl. After he attacked me, I could not bear to be touched by anyone for days. Desperately trying to rid myself of the filth I felt upon me, I had scrubbed, bleached and scorched all physical evidence away. (Give me a break! I was only 17!) When I found out that he had done it again, I went to the girl he had assaulted and encouraged her to lay charges against him.

She whimpered, in a wash of tears, “He’s ruined me. Ruined me!”

I moved in close, looking her in the eye. She met my gaze. “Did he touch your heart?” She shook her head, no. “Has he reached your spirit?” Again she shook her head. I responded, “That jerk had no hope of ruining you. He didn’t reach the real you. He never could.”

Early on in my life, amid the constant battle between the Indigo that would not conform and the people that could only cope if I did conform, I learnt that people could only hurt me if I let them. The only person who can make a victim of you is you.

We had been married only ten months and had just moved back from the Whitsunday Islands in Northern Queensland to Melbourne when I received a phonecall from one of the major hospitals. My husband, whilst at work with an engineering company, had been crushed while working inside an elevator shaft by the elevator that they had been assured was disabled. He had been dragged up the shaft by the elevator, crushed at the top and was again taken down with it. A horrific trauma. His injuries were incredible, as you can imagine. They explained on the phone that he was fighting for life, and as it turned out, limbs. Both legs were shattered, amongst other injuries. It was a long and colourful debate as to whether to amputate them. The decision to embrace the challenge to save them entailed years of rehabilitation and multiple surgeries.

It was an incident that truly demonstrated how life can completely shift in a single moment and just how challenging the commitment of marriage can be. Our path certainly altered that day. He shocked everyone with his determination, recovering incredibly, pushing himself and walking unaided within months…

And throughout this challenge Life lurched forward, shifting again. It was another big turning point, where the battle became extrinsic for me. There is a great period in your life when you are unencumbered by the responsibility of anyone other than yourself. It is a brilliant, unshackled adventure in time. But now I had to go to bat for my family (consisting of a husband at the time), and the extrinsic lessons began. The fight was and is no less passionate, but it was no longer just me.

Writing about one’s life is hard! I was told, “People need to know who you are, Melissa!” Looking back upon what I have shared with you, I see that it is but a fragment of a huge and complex life. As I go on through this journey I have chosen to fulfil, the unfolding is no less intense, but this a journey of purpose, and the “powerful play” goes on. If what I have shared appears obnoxious, or negative or self-pitying, my deepest apology; for that was not my intent. I assure you that writing about myself is the hardest and most uncomfortable part of this book.

Yet it is written for You. With purpose. With intent. What I hope so much that you will recognise through reading this is that I recognise and know your heart, through my own experiences. Know that I can empathise with all of the rubbish that you have gone through to get to this point; and I respect you for it, fellow warrior and potential healer that you are.

If you are, right now, in a place of despair, desperation or loneliness, then I invite you to take to heart the immortal words of Sir Winston Churchill (which I found on my friend Helen’s refrigerator magnet. Wisdom comes from the strangest places!).

“If you are going through Hell, keep going.”

You are making the right decisions.

Right now you are exactly where you need to be.

You are in the right place. It only gets better from here.