immediately. When he was only eleven hours old, they did a lumbar puncture that confirmed he also had bacterial meningitis. He was fighting for his life.
He was supine in what looked like an open tray, angled upward. Tubes ran in and out of this tiny newborn body, taped across his face, aggravating his soft, petal-like skin. Each breath was a struggle, with only the energy to survive. I couldn’t leave him. At the time I remember the need to keep going despite how unwell I was, to keep my wits about me, to hold my boy. Years later, my sister would show me a photo she had taken that day, and the terror in my eyes and the state of my health is plain.
The discovery of Jack’s infection triggered a search for others. Seven babies in total that day had been exposed to this bacteria and all were infected. Within a few hours they were all alongside Jack in Bay 7 of the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit, critical. The time that passed before finding the infected babies was crucial, and as my son and I fought for his life together, the others were losing their battles around us.
The horror was far too real.
It was one o’clock in the morning when they assured me that he was stable and wheeled me back to my room to rest. Three hours later, at four o’clock in the morning, the nurses exploded into my room. “The baby has taken a turn for the worse! We have to get you to NICU!” How much worse could it get?
He was sixteen hours old. Jack had gone into a massive seizure, his entire system trying to shut down. They couldn’t get any lines in and the panic on the faces of that extraordinary medical team was evident as they parted so that I could be next to my son. They told me I needed to speak to him; he needed to hear my voice.
I looked down at his grey, stiff little body. No detectable heartbeat. Not breathing. I touched his sweet, soft cheek, and said, “Hi Angel.” And his little head turned toward me.
I started to talk to him. It was our first serious conversation. Believe me, there was no brave hero or courageous mother in me when I told Jack that if this was too much, he could leave. I won’t even try to describe the utter desolation and despair in my heart at the thought of losing my child. Only experience lends you that kind of pain. My heart only knew sheer despair at the thought of him dying; the pain is still real for me now. But the battle ahead of him was brutal. Please, don’t mistake it. I was not spiritually evolved, I was not an outstanding woman by any means, there was truly nothing heroic about it.
I loved my son. I had, from the moment the incredulous doctor said, “You’re pregnant!” I didn’t understand why he would leave so soon, why he needed to go now. How could any mother’s heart understand? But I knew something big was at play here and the decision was Jack’s.
They worked frantically as I sang and spoke to him. Finally, I heard the magic words, “He’s stable.” A nurse touched me on the shoulder tenderly. “Would you like to call your husband?” I looked at the clock. It had been two and a half hours.
Not even a day old.
Seven babies had been exposed to these bacteria that day.
Jack was the only one to survive.
Exactly three years later, on Jack’s third birthday, I met one of those significant friends that come in and out of your life with a single purpose: to direct you.
I was reading an article about some fairly extraordinary work a gentleman had been doing with healing in the United States. This article was vague, but it was about the possible effect of quantum frequencies on human cellular regeneration. I read this and something within me clicked over, not unlike the arrow on a compass. I burst into tears, and not really understanding why I was so overwhelmed, I turned to my husband and said, “We have to find this man.” Bursting into tears is not common practice for me; the importance was evident, so after reading the article he said, “Whatever it takes. We’ll find him.” We had no money to spare and it looked like we needed to go the United States, but we both knew this was incredibly important. We started placing phone calls around the world trying to find him, only to discover that three days later he would be lecturing in Melbourne, the city where we lived.
So I went. From the beginning it was an unusual journey. The lecture was held at a facility I wasn’t familiar with, so when I arrived, I was at the wrong entrance for the facility and walked in at stage level. Immediately there was a small smattering of applause, as a few in the audience assumed I was the presenter. I took rapid evasive action and dived for a seat in the front row.
The crowd surprised me, to say the least. I had a double degree in science and had worked in the rehabilitation and sports industries. I expected other such professionals to be there. Honestly, part of my anticipation of these things is the incredible education that sprouts from the incidental acquaintances you meet; so I was expecting doctors, specialists, physiotherapists, etc. However, the incidental education I was to receive was not at all what I expected. Instead, the audience was filled with an extraordinary mix of people, having all manner of injury and illness, all of them wanting to be healed.
The lady next to me presented a very bad mix of chronic fatigue syndrome, and I spent most of the time throughout the “presentation” asking her if she was alright. She was all bundled up and yet still shivering, her breathing rapid and shallow. If I needed to know where the presenter was, all I had to do was watch her watering eyes as they tracked him. She desperately needed help, she wanted to be healed, and this man was the “miracle healer” she had been waiting for. (Miracle healer? Am I in the right place?) I listened to her impassioned yearning throughout the presentation. All I heard of the lecture was at the end, when one of his assistants responded to an audience question “…No, I’m afraid he doesn’t do private sessions. However, he will be teaching a workshop in two weeks’ time, here in Melbourne…”
Immediately I was miffed. I thought, Bloody charlatans! Here they go trying to rip us off with their bloody New Age workshops!What an incredible waste of all of our time.This is Jack’s third birthday and his mother is in here, listening to this rubbish!
My family was just outside, including Jack, three years old just that day and my eldest daughter Colby, just nine months. I could hear my husband happily chatting to someone, so I turned to the lady next to me to see if she needed assistance to leave. She was devastated. She had been hoping this man would work on her. As we talked and I consoled, the beautiful woman with whom Andrew had been speaking walked over and interrupted, introducing herself as Savannah. “Can you hang around for a while, sweetie? He wants to talk to you.” Savannah indicated the gentleman who had just been presenting. I was suspicious.
“Why?” I could see this man watching us through the crowd.
Andrew leaned in, smiling, and said, “We can hang around, can’t we?”
I couldn’t believe it! “Why?”
A voice said, “You have a gift for this.” I looked up into the eyes of a man who would turn out to be a key friend on this road of discovery. And so we hung around.
I didn’t really know why I was there, but I knew I had to be there. I assumed at the time that it must have been for Jack, and you couldn’t find a stronger purpose for me to stay. You see, the previous three years since Jack’s arrival had been laden with many a battle on my son’s behalf.
Jack has a severe level of spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy. He acquired it from the trauma to his brain due to bacterial meningitis. His is not what you’d call “textbook” cerebral palsy, (although what the hell that is I don’t know). Jack’s a handsome boy with clear speech, and all of his spastic tone is reactive tone. This means that you don’t really see the
