Weeks before after my first surgery, I was out for a walk one day around the old neighborhood. It is an example of Eastern Europe’s version of suburbia, so it’s not supposed to be so bad. Except that the acre-or-so forest right on its edge was now an unofficial dump for household garbage and construction waste. This was a problem even when I was growing up, but now it was completely out of control. No one seemed to care, not even the people whose houses were facing the forest and had to walk past large piles of unsightly garbage just to get home. I realized now how incredibly alien it has become to me to relate to the natural world this way. I was walking down a path when I heard a woodpecker working the bark somewhere in one of the trees. I looked up and there it was: a beautiful bird seemingly oblivious to devastation around it. I was going to take the same way back; and, I wanted to find a landmark to identify the tree by so I could take another gander at the bird. The thing that stuck out was an empty cigarette pack lying on the ground. On the pass back, I found the tree by way of the discarded pack, but the bird was gone. I thought about picking up the box, which wouldn’t be unusual for me to do, but there was so much trash on the ground I felt there was no point.

When I got out of the hospital for the second time and it was okay to go for a stroll again, my first trip led back to that tree. It was easy to find once again as the empty cigarette pack was still there. I picked it up and I uttered these words out loud:  “I am in need of a miracle. To show my worthiness, I will clean up these woods singlehandedly no matter how long it takes.” From that day on, when I wasn’t praying with the outmost sincerity or envisioning my healing with everything I could muster, I was out in that small patch of trees with filling large garbage bags with things that didn’t belong there.
 
My family and friends knew nothing of what I was doing. I wanted to keep it a secret in order to preserve the quest’s power and also because I was certain that if my mom found out that I was lifting two weeks after my surgery, she would try to kill me. I was so caught up in what I was doing, it took me a while to realize that they were puzzled by my behavior. While I kept mostly to myself, when I was in their company I seemed cheerful. And indeed that’s what was happening. Somehow, praying and visualizing with everything I had filled me with joy and inner contentment. I felt the love of the Creator permeating me through the white light I was trying to use to wash my disease away. My every step became a prayer. This is what the people around me saw. Even my mother told me one day that she admired my strength under the circumstances. No doubt she was reminded of the time she was battling cancer herself and the challenges she faced. I was honored and humbled at the same time.

Normally, doctors would recommend a partial removal of the bladder right away. Since, I was considered young at age of 34, I was told that if the tumor stayed away after the surgery, we would just cross our fingers and hope that it wouldn’t come back. Unfortunately, it only took six weeks for it to grow back with a vengeance, so much so that the option for partial amputation was taken off the table. Now they wanted have the whole thing. I was faced with a choice: become severely disabled for the rest of my life or die in a few short months.

Up until this point, I was just drifting along. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Firstly, we expected my dad to have a long life span, since both his father and grandfather enjoyed a long, relatively healthy life. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t remember my dad being sick more than a few times his entire life. I was the same way, but now it seemed that it was all slipping away. I put my life entirely in the hands of the doctors hoping that they would rise to the occasion.

That is until I found myself with my back completely against the wall. I remember lying in my hospital bed after my second surgery when my doctor came in and told me that the disease had progressed too far to salvage my bladder and that it had to go. This was beyond anything I could have ever imagined happening to me to the point that I didn’t even have a reaction. I was already beyond the stages of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, but something told me that it wasn’t quite time for acceptance just yet.

Years ago, I took two of Tom Brown’s philosophy classes at the Tracker School. We touched on a lot of things including healing. I just never had a lot of success with that. I have had great spiritual experiences with other things that I could directly trace back to what I learned at the school, but it seemed that putting the power of envisioning to use was impossible for me. When, for instance, I tried to perform self healing in the past by visualizing the white light permeating my entire body and washing whatever was ailing me into the earth, I would start out with a strong image, but then the resolve would quickly leave me as if it was I was an old, rusted-out bucket trying to hold water.

But now there I was completely having run out of options. I thought to myself that if I was ever going to give this a serious try, the time was now. I made the decision that I was going to push all my doubts aside and spend all my time besides eating, sleeping and having minimal contact with my family with meditating and praying. And I mean all my time until I was either cured or my bladder was gone.

My brother called me that day. He told me that they checked my dad into the hospital. He had not been well. He was suffering from increasing back pain that his doctor diagnosed as arthritis. Now it appeared that it was much more serious than that: cancer had attacked his spine. There was a real chance that he was going to get paralyzed from the waist down as the disease progressed.

This was not the first time that one of our parents was diagnosed with something like this. My mom developed breast cancer less than a decade earlier. While that was nothing short of horrible, somewhere deep down I had a feeling that she was going to pull through, which she did. We have a saying where I come from: ‘lightning won’t strike poison ivy’, which means that if you are tough enough trouble will just avoid you. I always thought about her that way. I mean there was no way she was going to make it into haven, and sure as heck that hell wasn’t going to put up with her. It was different this time. Something told me that this was going to be it for my dad.
As soon as I could, I gave up my apartment and put my belongings in storage in anticipation of a prolonged stay away from the United States. In less than three weeks, I was on a plane back to the old country. My younger brother and sister-law-picked me up from the airport, and we drove straight to the hospital. It had been over a year since I last saw him, and what I saw numbed me to my very core. He was already frail and half the weight he used to be.

In 100 days, he was gone. I remember leaving the hospice that night where he had stayed and noticing a full moon hovering over the building. I considered it an auspicious sign, a worthy signal to the end of the gripping but, at the same time, wonderful journey that he and I were on together for little over three months. While my mom and my two brothers did everything they could, I was the one with the time to spare and the strength to lift him in-and-out of the wheelchair. We grew really close together, perhaps closer than we have ever been before.

But you know what they say: when it rains, it pours. A month or so later, I was already preparing to return to the good ol’ U.S.A. to resume my life here, when a routine checkup revealed a mass in my bladder. When the results of the biopsy came back, they told me I had cancer. To make matters worse, it was an extremely rare form of bladder cancer, one that does not respond to chemotherapy or radiation and has been known to spread quickly. To me, it made all the sense in the world. The first two weeks after my father’s passing were too horrible to put into words. Then something happened: the pain subsided considerably, unnaturally so. I thought that in an effort to cope with his loss, I swept it under the rug, so to speak. I was certain that that’s why I got cancer.