not in my hands

There are only sounds. Footsteps in the corridor. Voices. The wheels of the trolley towards the floor when they come to measure the blood pressure, temperature, pulse – or take more blood tests.

I cover my eyes every time the door opens. The energy in the room is changing when someone new enters. And when they leave.

After a while I recognize the voices of the different nurses; the warmth and the care, the tone, the dialect, accent or stress.

I was sent to the hospital in an ambulance, with a high fever and an intense headache, the day after the last treatment of chemo- and immune therapy.

One after the other, the doctors are coming to see me: My blood tests are fine, my immune system is still up and going. They don’t worry much about that, or about my migraine-like headache in itself. But during the last weeks, I have lost parts of my sight.

A doctor looks at me. «Do you see what I am doing with my right hand?», he asks. His hand is close to my face.

«You mean my right side?», I ask, and look at him empty, «you don’t do anything with your right hand». With the left, he is fiddling with a pen and a paper.

Only later, I realize that I didn’t see his right hand either still or moving. I didn’t see it at all.

There is something neurological in my brain that messes with my sight.

It is weekend, and the hospital is quiet. I have the room alone, and have no pull to go home or to go anywhere at all. I keep covering my eyes when someone opens the door or the curtains. Or if the light is switched on. I go to the toilet, or take a shower in the dark. Except that, I do nothing.

Sunday evening one more room mate arrives. She has just been home for the weekend. Early Monday morning, a third woman moves into the room. We are all sick from different kinds of cancer treatments.

The last one to arrive is laying maybe just a meter from my head, with only a thin curtain in between. She cannot stop vomiting. She has brain cancer, and has tried both immune therapy and chemo. Now she is clinging to the hope about a test medicine in a science project, and she is going through the side effects.

All three of us gets visitors to the room; doctors, nurses, relatives. Every conversation I hear is about body, sickness, worry, pain – or about clinging to hopes.

The mattress is too hard for me. The bed is narrow. I get more and more pain from my hips and pelvis, and I don’t manage to change position easily by night. I don’t sleep or rest well.

Hypophysitis, an inflammation in the hypophyse can happen as a side effect from immune therapy, and it could explain my symptoms. It is rare, but possible. Normally it would show in some hormone levels in the blood tests, but my blood tests are fine.

My symptoms can also be metastasis in the brain. I will need a MRI of the head to find out.

More and more, my focus goes to the pain and the cancer. My mind goes in circles, wants answers;

Is there cancer in my brain?
How long time do I have left to live in this body? Up to now there has still been a hope about years. Is that hope still there?

I have some dark hours there in the hospital bed.

Those dark hours also awakens the urge to turn in, to go deeper.

I have carried a sadness since I left Brazil. Leaving there, with the question about if this was the last time? The last time I saw the Master, many of the friends in the sangha, the Beloved’s garden and the White Lotus Temple?

I know – nothing or no-one, in the physical form, can come with me, – when I close my eyes and turn in for the last time… When that moment comes, when I leave this body.

I know, there is nowhere else to find peace, than inside myself.

There is nothing I can grasp.

Nothing I can hold on to.

Still, I cling.

There is a moment in that hospital bed, that I think about prayers, about reaching out to God.

In the same moment, God shines smiling from within – through my tears, through my pain and my tiredness –
A laughter, and I know – I am not separated.

I am

sitting In a hospital bed, over stimulated, tired and vulnerable.

With both tears and rest, despair and relief.

I am exhausted and polluted.

But there is no doubt in me in this moment: I am not separated from the Universe, from the Master – or what I call God.

After 4 nights, the headache is milder and the fever gone – there is no reason to keep me in the hospital, except waiting for the MRI. I can go home, and come back again for the scan a couple of days later.

There is nothing to do, but wait. And rest.

At home, in my own bed, on my soft mattress and under my cozy duvet – I laugh, and then I cry.

In the next days, I cry every time someone asks me how I am doing, if someone calls or stops by. My system is overwhelmed, it is running over and emptying out by itself.

Staying in the hospital was brutal for me.

When the whole atmosphere and the whole energy becomes only about the body, about the pain, the sickness and the side effects, it is so easy to lose touch of that I am so much more than that.

Still I see; that despair was also a helping hand – to bring me deeper into myself, and to prepare the space for whatever will come now.

There was one moment, I asked myself, I asked God in me – Do I still want to live? Do I still want to receive life extending treatment – if everything happening in my body now are side effects from the treatments?
The answer was so simple.

If I can live for a Love bigger than my own little self and my own little life – I will so gladly go on living. Its what I am here for.

If my life, from here, is only about pain, body, sickness and my own survival… Then it is meaningless to go on with treatments.

It is so simple. So clear. And it is not in my hands.