White Clouds, Blue Sky...

When the doctor told me the result of the PET scan I was not surprised… Well… that is what I thought… However, later, I found myself in shock. It lasted about two days. My daughter Julieta was with me as I was going through all the tests that lasted about two months. The doctor seemed very sad when he told me that I had a primary cancer in the colon and two metastasis in the liver. My mind went back: One year ago my annual tests routine showed no signs of cancer; the cancer markers were lower than ever… Just one year… What happened? I thought of Hans’s health deteriorating quickly. His two heart failures, his stroke, his general wellbeing going down so rapidly, and his horrible death due to the hospital negligence last January. I thought of his very difficult personality, which made so difficult for me to deal with the whole situation, in and out of hospital. I thought of the loneliness I felt after his death; that terrible and indescribable vacuum left and the cruel reality tha...

I don’t know what hurt s more, the deception about what happened or my own deception about myself. What happened, after all, shouldn’t be a surprise to me, and in a way I saw it quite clearly before I left to Argentina, and this takes me to confront that what is happening outside is always happening within myself and I never want to see it. Just as others want to believe in fairytales, so I do. And this is my great disappointment! The way I keep on cheating myself! We walk limitless distances to avoid seeing the truth that we are alone; that whatever is out there is just our own creation, or better say, the creation of this madness called “five aggregates”(form, feelings, perception, mental formation and consciousness). And all comes down to FEAR. It is fear the one emotion that keeps us from seeing the mechanism at work, fear fed by ignorance. Everything we do is because of fear; everything we avoid is because of fear. We sublimate this with awesome words as “democracy”, “fam...

The call to return home   I was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2009. Not only was it a very aggressive type, but it had positive hormone receptors, which meant that the growing rate of the cancer cell was much faster. The news, to me, came as an enormous opportunity more than a frightening reality. This was because cancer confronted me with the fear of death, and that helped me to put things in a much different perspective. Suddenly the NOW became of paramount importance, and in that 'now' there was stillness and an unfamiliar confidence never experienced before. After two operations, and many infections and health conditions in between due to a completely flat immune system, the second shock was the realization that the journey was not yet started; now I had to agree to an aggressive plan of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy if I wanted to survive.   I was told of the risk of the radiation on the left breast affecting the heart, and having vessel di...

The second operation to clear the margins was done one month after the first one, in July 2009. I felt completely clear from cancer, however, I was advised to undergo an aggressive treatment of Chemo, Radio and Hormone Therapy to prevent cancer from coming back. They said I had an aggressive cancer grade 3 with all receptors positive. From the beginning of the journey I had welcomed cancer as an opportunity to awake from the insanity that kept me stuck in an endless struggle, and now, I found myself stuck again, having to choose in between what my gut feelings were whispering: a holistic and natural approach focusing in the body, mind and spirit by adjusting diet, thoughts and behaviour patterns and the consequential relationship to my self and others, or the nasty and invasive chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy advised by the doctors. The fact is; when they were concerned with how much time I had to live, I was suddenly more concerned about the quality of my remin...

There was no deeper pain that the realisation that I was not able to love... that love was only a concept... Something that the good people do, and I should as well... This was something too difficult for me to come to terms with... It was needed to be taken with paramount and very subtle care... as if opening a door little by little, because the reality of that vision was not only going to burn my eyes, buy my whole being. There was so much pain in my heart! And so much anger... And it was all frozen... unreachable to my feelings... to the extent that I came to believe that I was completely numbed. It was from this frozen place, from this icy land in my heart that the scream came through when I touched the lump for the first time. But the scream was frozen instantly, and I entered into total denial. I told myself - "it is some muscle inflammation..."- This could not be even possible... cancer? Me? What a joke!!! There is no one that had cancer in my entire f...