ABSTRACT
While staying at my parents over Christmas in 1969 my appendix ruptured, my belly became the home of pus, and from there on in my intestines refused to work. In the hospital where I was born, the doctor scurried in an out with averted gaze and told my parents that he couldn't do anything more for me. I was most likely to die. Emaciated and yellow, a victim of starvation, I sat with my legs dangling over the side of my bed. It had been an enormous effort to get into a sitting position. I looked in the mirror and realized with absolute clarity that this was all a big mistake. This was not the story of my life. I had become lost in the story of someone who was not me. I was not supposed to die right now. I was supposed to live a lifetime, experience with passion, not be a human wreck and die in the same hospital in which I had been born less than 22 years before. I felt a switch within me, a certainty that this was most de®nitely not it. My health started to return from that moment on.
