Hello dear friends and readers. So let me rejoin the story without further ado as you are maybe likely to be sitting in front of the computer during a hot late August European heatwave.

I woke up gingerly from having slept on my back without moving. Flies buzzed. The pink plastic hand of God beckoned from the other side of the room but I couldn’t move very quickly let alone make a swatting action with my right arm. I was in a blue trailer on the farm. I had managed the night without a bleed, though it had been a bit touch and go before I slept; radiotherapy often creates little surface bleeds and I had had a moment of belly fear panic before sleeping. Gabba had sat by me on night watch prepared for a long haul until I insisted that it was safe to leave me and that she could go to bed.

So I was in a pickle. Or it felt like I was in a pickle. For 12 years I had laboured with this errant energetic cell behaviour in my body, and all for this! As I said before, the bleed and hospitalization had been a game changer and I knew that I had to make some kind of different action, or to revise and revisit things I had done before in a different way. But What?

Before I came to Germany I had already decided that I was no longer going to co-exist with this, it felt time to unequivocably command it to go. I mean I had commanded it to go before, but I needed to get all parts of me onside, make a link between the multiple realities existing within my being and join up all the dots. I had also decided to find a German clinic. Well I had manifested that sure enough and pretty quickly, just not the type of clinic I was envisaging!

I don’t know about you reader, but for myself I miraculously have access to deep resources of self discipline and self trust, yet sometimes it feels like I use up all my self discipline so early in the day that there is none left over for the simple things, like cooking the evening meal early enough or /and getting to bed early.

Getting to bed early. It has eluded me, slipped through my fingers like a slippery snake all my life, feeling counterintuitive to how I am. I have cajoled and invited, threatened and beaten myself to try and make it happen but there is a part of me like a stubborn horse who won’t be led to water, that just tosses it’s rainbow coloured main and refuses. Point blank. (guineapigs, horses, snakes – welcome to the anthropomorphic world of my plural realities!) It’s like I can do hardcore fasts and enemas and colonics, daily juicing and no sugar for 12 years, I can break myself, reconstruct myself, detach from things I hold dear – like veganism – and then refind it, alter my perception of things and adhere to nay enjoy complicated meditation practices, tick off checklists and complete disciplines before 9am if I have to, but the sleep thing – ah Morpheus you elude me

While I am on it permit me to share with you the second thing I have never managed to get a handle on, and something which is a main protocol for stimulating the immune system – cold showers. Cold showers! Squeak! Who has daily cold showers first thing in the morning? I mean for the first eight years of working with this I did not even have access to a shower, yet as a cancer protocol it is gold standard. Oxford Don Michael Gearin Tosh if you remember lived with pancreatic cancer and worked for 16 years swearing by the Gerson diet, 5 element organ detoxing and … cold showers. I mean Madonna apparently has just got into ice cold water as a beauty/health thing as well.

So I am on this farm, staying in Gabba’s trailer from which I don’t surface for a few days. Gabba and Coost deliver hot meals for me – the house has a system whereby all members of the collective take it in turns to cook and clean up daily but I start to think about how I am going to wash. There is no hot water here. There is no wifi. There is an outdoor and an indoor compost toilet.

Coost has washed all my bloody clothes in cold water and the blood is all out, and then put them in the washing machine but I can’t put myself in the washing machine.

Gabba has an outside hose behind a makeshift shower curtain between some trees, but I am terrified no longer trusting my body to comply. I was also very fatigued and the prospect of navigating an outdoor cold hosepipe whilst protecting my modesty and being paranoiac about a breast wound wasn’t doing it for me.

My first precautionary measure was to request some Chinese medicine (for gun shot wounds amongst other things) that I have used previously with success in the Uk to stop bleeding called Yunnan Baiyao. I thought if I had it on hand then if the unthinkable happened I would have some recourse to positive action. My friends in Berlin couldn’t source it over the counter. The local Chinese herbalist two minutes from my house sells it but I am not there. My life research Cambridge lab rat gets on the case. Within 2 hours of receiving the instruction late on a Wednesday afternoon she had sourced, in exemplary fashion, bought and sent a couple of packets on the way through courier by 6pm. I was extremely grateful and felt a bit calmed by this. It is amazing medicine.

A day later I feel ready to brave my first wash. Gabba points out that there is a bathroom in the farmhouse that has a wood burner to heat up water. I just need some-one to chop the wood, light the fire, and maintain it. All this is outside of my remit. I cannot bend or bow, or use my right arm very much, or either of my arms actually, but Coost sorts all that out for me, and once again Gabba stays in with me to make sure nothing untoward happens. It doesn’t. Everything is fine.

I continued to rest. I wasn’t bored. There was goat tv, horse tv, pony tv and dogs interacting with all of the above tv from the window in the trailer, but by the end of the week I was curious about this outside shower. It had a very long hose attached to a tap from an underwater source. This very long hose was in the sun. ‘The water is hot’ says Gabba, ‘the sun heats it up in the hose. It is so lovely having a shower outside with the birds and the trees’ (not the bees – though of course there are many bee hives here). My curiosity increased. I ventured out and sniffed around. I decided to go for it. Hanging bits and pieces I would need on the tree branches in the shower area, making sure I had things ‘just in case’ I clumsily stood on the wooden pallet in the little secluded wooded area behind the shower curtain and held the sprinkler attachment on the end of the hose. I pressed it in. The water was luxuriously warm. Gloriously warm. I basked in brief pleasure and then tout d’un coup icy cold. Well not so icy cold but pretty goddam near icy cold. and do you know what – once I got over the shock of it it was delicious.

Wow I thought I could get into this big time. Cold showers by default. A little warm water first then bam. This was something I could do, aided by the lack of choice in the matter.. at last I can start using this as a health protocol. Couple that with farm life – where everyone gets up at the crack of dawn, fresh air with the no wifi, intermittant phone signal and no electric lights outside which makes a trailer pitch dark at night early bedtimes also suddenly become a possibility.

There was a reason I came here, and these two things were going to be the new building blocks from which I would recharge my immune system whilst I started looking for holistic clinics and protocols to support for my situation.

Tune in next week for for what happened next.

Love Calliope

And here are are some pictures