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
