The Roller-Coaser of Life - Vistior's Story

by Janet Hobbs
(Canada)

I don't care how wise someone is. We all live life by the seat of our pants. I mean, life is a roller-coster really. You grow up and all of a sudden you're in it, and really rolling and you can't get off and it is hard to see through your fear and there isn't anything you can do until it stops.

Nobody really tells you it's like this. No school teaches us how to live life. you find out when you're on the roller-coaster.

Perhaps the question really is how gracefully can we ride, how peacefully, how much courage and trust is there for the ride. I'm sure it's possible to ride a really scary roller-coaster with one's heartbeat still in the normal range. It could be used as a test in some spiritual school of enlightenment.

I think I rode one of the scariest roller-coasters possible when my infant son was diagnosed with terminal leukaemia.

The heavy handed specialist gave us no hope at all. There was nothing they could do, he informed us. He said baby John had a year at the outside.

I went home and in that kind of timeless pause where the infinite and the material meet, I decided that if I believed the doctors, John would feel it in my milk and would give up. Who wouldn't? I saw the choice not to believe them and instead to put my faith in John. Maybe I could fuel his decision to live.

All that hugely powerful, maternal passion went into this decision. I willed him to get better. I held him. I nursed him. I loved him with my full being. I realized that before when I had loved people, I had loved them with about 10 per cent of my being. John got 100 per cent and I got a lesson in what love really is.

We needed a miracle here and I received several. The first was the my dad shared my gut feelings. He believed John would live. He was the one person who stood with me in the far out place where you trust something invisible when the obvious data points the other way.

The miracle of it was that while growing up, my father had caused me enormous pain. So for him to come alongside me at this time, in a place so deep in our hearts, was a Godsend.

Another miracle was more of a sequence.

It started when two pictures of John fell off the wall, shattering the glass of both. A few days later, one of his Peter Rabit plates fell and smashed. Then, very soon after that, a small child came over and while her mother and I were talking, the little girl got a hammer and crushed a beloved music box I had bought for John.

I had bought the box at the onset of John's illness to cheer us all up. It had turned into a symbol of eventual triumph.

And now it was smashed. And so fragile was my faith that the music box's demise smashed our lives too. The bottom just fell out.

Life now just seemed so stark and unloving. God just seemed like a bad joke. I could barely stand to be alive, could hardly bare the agony of it. The only thing that kept me going was John who needed my love, hugs and adoration and I gave myself to him 100 per cent.

Even if God didn't exist, I could still believe John was going to get better. If the Great Spirit's love didn't exist, at least mine did. (This was my reasoning.)

It took me several weeks to feel my love strong again. I was still scared and things looked stark but my love flowed utterly to John. Then one day, I had to go to the store. Depressed and worried though I was, I followed an unusual path into a nearby gift shop.

There on a shelf was a single music box, identical to the other one. That was truly amazing as I had bought it overseas. And don't you know it was on sale for half price!

I bought it. I took it as a signal of the Great Spirit's assurance that the child would live.

This brings me to the third and biggest miracle of all. Two days after I had made that crucial decision to ignore the doctor's death sentence, my mother, plus an incredible series of co-incidences, put me in touch with a famous healer named Olgas Worral.

Olga Worral, then a woman in her 80's, had once lost her infant twins to dysentery and now worked with sick children, sending compassion to ailing youngsters all over the world. We spoke. Olga asked for no payment. Nor did she need to touch or meet John to help. She just needed to know his full name. Then she asked me to put my hands on him every night at 7 pm to ground the compassion she was sending.

I knew Olga was gold.

The cancer clinic monitored John's white cell count, checking him once every two weeks. We had watched it climb steadily. When John was 10 months, it had hit 60,000, six times higher than normal. The high white cell count left his skin so pale, it was almost transparent. John hardly moved or made any noise. He was a sick baby.

We started working with Olga. The next check up showed the count had dropped by 1,000 and that he had gained a pound in weight. The time after that, his cell count had dropped another 1,500 and John had gained another pound.

This continued. Gradually over the next three years, John's white blood cell count fell to normal and he began to grow and flourish.

The doctors didn't say much, except to tell me that the remission wouldn't last and not to get my hopes up. i just smiled...

I phoned Olga regularly to thank her and heard that people seldom let her know how their loved ones fared. Sometimes they'd phone up three years later to say: "Thanks for helping Uncle Bill. He's fully recovered.. Can you help Aunt Sara now.

She would.

Much later, after Olga had died, I read an article in which she'd participated in an experiment which featured an dysentery culture and penicillin. When she spent time in a laboratory, maybe an hour or so a day, the penicillin took 10 times as long to kill the bacteria as usual.

I think Olga embodied so much love, that her mere presence strengthened all of life, even the dysentery bacteria. But what impressed me was that when she gazed into the petri dish, at the same type of bacteria, that had killed her infant children some 50 years earlier, her capacity for unconditional love was so strong, her comment was: "Cute little critters, aren't they?"

My hat off to her.

(John is approaching his 27th birthday. There has been no incidence of the leukaemia.)