The Amish (German: Amisch or Amische) religious sect of Swiss-German immigrants who first settled in the USA in the 18thCentury mainly in the North East states of Ohio, Wisconsin & New York, with a small percentage in Southern Canada.  They are peaceful, conservative Christians who to this day, resist modernity and keep themselves largely to themselves.  In a 1985 movie called ‘Witness’, starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, there is a powerful scene where an entire community, including children, come together to erect a significant wooden-framed structure such as a barn in a single day.  They do this by gathering all the necessary material beforehand, organise duties from the complex, to the physically demanding, down to the lightest of duties by the frail and very young.  When all is in place, the following dawn, the implementation begins in earnest and by sundown, a new and viable structure becomes part of the landscape.

Such meticulous preparation, planning, organisation and effective leadership has always fascinated my professional curiosity and interest and this particular part of the film is one of my favourite cinematic scenes of all time.  So, what does speed-building a barn in a day, have to do with my cancer experience?  Actually, nothing and everything.

We live our lives the best way we know and need.  We can be random, impulsive, reactive, proactive, pre-determined; all the way to being highly organised, precise, and working in complete harmony with a group of people to produce optimal results.  An example of that would be a full orchestra producing a wonderful and spiritually uplifting piece of music.

At 09:30 on Friday, 24 August 2018, I had four tiny pieces of my fast-wasting liver painfully extracted through a highly sophisticated biopsy procedure.  Those milligrams of my body tissue were to complete the gathering of data and information. With an anxious weekend looming, the biopsy results were to be released late on Monday afternoon. I was summoned by the head of the wonderful facility (German Oncology Center, GOC) in Limassol, Cyprus.  I will speak of this amazing and awe-inspiring oncologist, Professor Nikos Zamboglou in a future post.

On the morning of Tuesday 28thAugust I arrived at the GOC and the professor took me to a private room, sat me down, reached out, touched my left hand and said: “Dear Mufid, it’s a tumour and we need to treat it”.  Those 11 words floated out of his mouth and one by one landed deep in my conscience mind to fill in the last pieces of the overall picture puzzle I needed to draw on all of my life-experience to make a determined effort to go into ‘fast implementation’ mode.  I wanted to build my own barn!

From that Tuesday morning moment (roughly 11:00 am) to being wheeled into the operating room in a specialist hospital in Nicosia (American Medical Center, AMC) for my life-death operation on Friday 31 August was 70 hours!  It would be an under-statement to say that those 70 hours were filled with multiple decisions, actions, and final preparations. For as long as I live, I will never experience a more focused, determined and purposeful 70-hour period; each and every hour is indelibly imprinted in my mind and soul.

In the coming days / weeks, I plan to share with you my journey in more detail however, I will no longer tell my story, in a chronological order as though I am narrating a story.  I am going to break it up in to different experiences, characters and observations.  I believe this will be less boring for me to write about and hopefully, more interesting for you to read about. I assure you, most of the posts will have little misery & pain and more optimistic, funny, embarrassing (to me), and celebration of amazing, wonderful people who, in their own different ways, helped bring me back to life.  Above all, I hope to convey to you that out of adversity, we can extract life-affirming lessons that will shine a guiding light on the remaining days of our lives.

 

Footnote: for those of you who happen to pick up this post via LinkedIn, I will no longer send an alert via this medium on this particular subject, because I do not think it is necessarily appropriate.  If however, you would like to continue to read my  ‘Fighting Cancer’ posts, all you have to do is to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and subscribe where you will get an automatic alert when I publish a new posts under this category.

Thank you for reading this post and I welcome your comments, if you have any to share with me.