The Roller Coaster of Life

Spiritual Story by Janet Hobbs

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

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

I went home and in a 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 percent and I got a lesson in what love really is.

We needed a miracle here and I received several. First, my dad came in behind me, believing too, that John would live. He was the one person who stood with me, trusting in something intangible when the obvious data pointed the other way. (Others tended to think I was just in denial...)

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 and the glass inside both of them broke. 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 its 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.

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 impulse 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 at half price!

I bought it. I took it as a signal of the Great Spirit's assurance that the child would live which he did, despite such a terminal diagnosis.

(Maybe doctors should ask mothers what they think more.)

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 coincidences, 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 7pm 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 hit 60,000, six times higher than normal. The cell count left his skin so white, it was almost transparent. He hardly moved or made any noise. He was a sick baby.

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

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.

'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 of her own godself, 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 children some 50 years earlier, her capacity for unconditiional love was so strong, her comment was:

"Cute little critters, aren't they?"

My hat off to her.