The brain and my mind 1

I’m going to share my story of how when I was classified as a patient and to so many who look up to me, my brain was so wrecked and broken. And I know that there are even people who see me, as I was. But many see me that I am incapable of everything. But I tell you why, falls make me learn about life.

In any case, every time I wanted to see countries along the way, I thought that seeing them along the way would suggest the meaning of life. Even before and after being a patient in the Hospital.
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But I want to write, as I still can, and as I perceive how it seems to me to be reported by the brain. So I’ll break down how I was ranked in various ways.

Don’t think that I don’t value medicine, it’s the opposite. It’s the way I understood medicine, like alternative methods and cultures. So I discovered how everything is in our mind. So I’ll tell you slowly.

I started to feel different things and I was 26 years old. I was traveling in Morocco with my husband at that time Haiko Ballieux .

I wanted to go to Morocco for a while. I had left to visit the country of 3 very important people in my life. When I moved to the US in 2001, I met Leila, Mounia and Mustapha in college. All those who will make me teach things in my life. So I wanted to go and see what it was like there. I managed to go there in 2007 .

When I arrived in Marrakesh, Mounia had already done many beautiful things, and had even arranged a trip to the Salar. And I also wanted to go to Rabat, and to Casablanca. As Haiko had to go back to London I decided that I would get to know the country better, as I was getting enchanted.

I continued on to Chefchaouen and was blown away. .
I had been traveling alone for some time and the gentlemen invited me to travel in their car.

He was buying art from Morocco to sell in Spain and he thought it was dangerous for me to travel alone and that he might show me places along the way. I wasn’t afraid, but I thought it would be interesting to see the path, and Ceuta.

But when I was loving traveling around Morocco and the culture, I crossed over from Morocco to Spain. I was in the car and I think the beginning of the warm-up of the mind must have started. I’ve already stayed in a hotel and wanted to go back to Morocco, but without a car.

Going on foot was easy, but crossing the African border into Europe is a shock. From the side of Europe come the Africans who are desperate because nothing has worked in Europe. And when I crossed I saw Africans desperate for a better life on the other side.

I found a taxi and stopped in a city, I don’t remember the name of the city. I just kept thinking about what the border was like. I remember that at the border I was first in the Spaniards’ car, we were white and we didn’t even need to wait for anything, we didn’t even see the black Africans anymore. Already on foot I saw the black Africans and they told me that I should go ahead. I said I was the same as everyone else, but a man said to me “I think you don’t know the reality. “

I couldn’t even say anything because, among whites in Brazil and throughout America, and Latin America, we know how much discrimination there is, and in Europe. I had lived in all these areas of the world.

I remember wanting to stop traveling and go back to Marrakesh. When I arrived I told Moon everything, and that I came by bus and people don’t even respect traditions. The time of Ramadan had begun.

That night I went to sleep and with a thousand thoughts, I started to feel like I didn’t know what was going on in my head. I remember wanting to tell Moon, but getting in the way in the middle of the night. I was so confused I didn’t know what it was. I was afraid, because it seemed that he couldn’t get away from me. Because it happened in the middle of the night.

I started feeling a strong shock in the head and discovered involuntary movements in the fingers of one hand. And so I erased what erases you and the next day I told Mounia.

When I got back to London, I was on the flight and my right hand started moving. Next to me was a doctor, and he asked me if I took the medicine. I told him everything, I never have to take medicine. He told me that I should go see a doctor

I just saw the place of public doctors. First a general doctor came, and I had to tell him what happened, I told him and he called the second one and I had to repeat what I told him, he called the third doctor and told me that I needed to go to the hospital. That is, he realized it was a neurology case.

It made me desperate.

In October 2007 I was admitted to St Mary’s Hospital, in London, where they did an MRI that showed demyelinating lesions in the brain. I fell asleep in the Hospital for the first time.

I go against the hospital’s instructions to collect cerebrospinal fluid, leave the hospital and not take the prescribed anticonvulsants. I had even asked Haiko not to tell my parents.

I started looking for alternative medicine treatments.

But in 2008 and I was talking to my mom, and my Skype words wouldn’t come out. So I wrote it down. It was calm, but my mother bought it quickly to start seeing me sick.

As I left my mother’s writing
“ 2/14/08 – She is speechless while talking to me on Skype. He arrives in Brazil on the same night and is admitted to Hospital Samaritano, where he stays from 02/15 to 02/26, under the care of Dr. Getulio Rabello, neurologist. There she undergoes all kinds of tests and nothing wrong is found, but she already leaves with a slight sequel in her speech (exchange of syllables) and Dr Getulio even suspects Multiple Sclerosis.”

That made me desperate, taking the exam, touching your body, your head, etc.

But I don’t even want to talk about exams. I want to tell you about the positive things. Because I’m learning how many beautiful things we learn through the falls.

It was even in the hospital, I learned that I was accepted for my master’s at the LSE, I wouldn’t have learned cognition. Nor would I have fallen and gone to India and learned Buddhism and meditation.

But I also want to tell slowly because I will be classified with several diseases, and I have also been in the hospital when I didn’t take medication for Epilepsy, and even when I didn’t take it. I already lost talking and walking and coming back. Forget things and remember. I’ve had hallucinations, pain, etc.

But I’m telling little by little that I’m even happier and better than I fell. So every second I breathe, I already see my life. Almost everything is here you need to break free like me,
With love,
Jules

This World

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My dear friends,

I have not written in a while… that is because I am almost done with my book. Mosaic, the Path in Between…..
But there is a last episode I owe you… and I want to share before my book should be print by the end of the month… when I plan to be in Switzerland to show it….
but this is my last news… of my last hospital trip…. it is important so please read…

Dr. Getulio

 

“This is truly unbelievable! Just completely unbelievable. Just like you can refuse a doctor I can refuse a patient. I want to say something very serious to you. If you do not take your medicine I will not be your doctor anymore. I can’t take this anymore Julieta!  You are beautiful, intelligent, brilliant! Why did you not take your pills Ju! Why?”

 

Dr. Getulio entered my life as the neurologist who was to explain me why was it that my brain was destructing itself. It has been now almost 6 years that he entered my life. I was terrified at first because what I could possibly have was multiple sclerosis. For the past  I never really knew much about Multiple Sclerosis, but it terrified me.  For  the last  6 years I know Dr. Getulio I have been on epilepsy medicine. Since I was first admitted to Hospital six years ago I have embarked on a journey to attempt to try to understand what had happened to me.

 

Multiple Sclerosis became eventually a long faded possibility. You all have now read my last episode. I woke up paralyzed one morning and  that  is not why Dr. Getulio is furious with me. He is furious because of “now”. This week, just as I am about to print this book which has been put together in a very short time, with the help of all of my friends I just decided to stop my epilepsy pills because I visited a doctor that said that that was a possibility.

 

I did not follow the advice of that doctor fully either. He was a homeopath and he told me I could stop. I should have waited and should have been more cautious, I should have done it properly, I should have reduced it cautiously. But being me, always so willing to ditch allopathy I just stopped the medicine all together on my own way.

 

I was playing piano to a friend, Eduardo Simanthob, a brilliant poet and writer (and who is now one of the editors of this book) when suddenly I had too much energy in me. I do not remember anything anymore. I seized. I hurt my whole body in that fit. I was once more admitted to hospital and it is because of that that Dr, Getulio, my family and my friends are now  furious.  For once in my lifetime, I  was actually not scared of the seizure. I felt protected.

 

“ I have no idea what caused all the rest that happened to you Julieta. I don’t know why you lost myelin in your brain. I do not know why your tongue one day was paralyzed. All exams show  absolutely nothing.  But  there is one thing I am certain of, and that is that you are epileptic. I am not sure what caused the loss of myelin in your brain 6 years ago but that has left a focus of epilepsy. You do not not need to do anything but take one pill a day to control this! Why can’t you do it?”

 

Dr. Getulio is a brilliant doctor. He is trusted by all. I trust him. And I have just decided to add him here as my last super character. He is not here because he is a brilliant doctor,  I chose to put him here  because he changed something structural on the way I think this week.

 

I decided to write this book so that we all could live better, so that we would not have to quit the world. I always knew I should write a book, but I have never fully known what it should be about. In a conversation with my friend Paula Gabriel, we concluded we both, who are nice people had been quite suicidal. We wondered what was happening, that so many people were so unhappy? Paula pondered that we had been born seeing cartoons of the future, and that now we were all terrified with the collapse of the world. Suddenly, we all wanted to be present. Paula and I always talked about how this form of being present, just to satisfy egoic chemical releases left us in the end completely lost, alone, and disconnected.

 

When my book eventually came about, I knew I wanted to write a book so that we,  people, who cared for others, we most of us genrous people, , could find a way to sstop wanting to quit the worldt. My answer, or the beginning of it seemed to be in gentleness, in more care of those around.

 

This week when I seized, and could deal so well with the pain of the attack that must have been something wrong. I realised my feeling ok with the attack was almost as a total lack of care for life just like my previous wanting to die phase.  As I was about to print this book, a book where I call for a more caring world,  my body reminded me one more time that we live in a physical world. I realised that when I attempt to negate allopathy altogether to have cures that come solely from ideas, or beliefs I once again quit the world and the human experience. I forget the absolute importance of those around me.  When I do not take my medicine, I realise, I do not value the work of so many people I deeply respect, I do not value my own life, when I do not take the medicine I quit the world.

 

I have a body that is having unnecessary pain now because of an ideological choice I made. I can deal with the pain well now. Those around me do not deserve to go through this pain. So I add Dr Getulio here as a way to apologize to all. In an act to understand that my life is precious and worth to be lived in its best way.  As an act of realization that in not taking simple measures to prevent harm to myself I hurt myself and others.

 

DR. Getulio embodies to me an abandonment of my total idealism.

 

“ I speak as a friend nor as a doctor Julieta. I will one day write a book. Though I am a neurologist.  I confess I believe most diseases are psychosomatic. One day I will write a book about that.”

 

I am sure he will. I am sure it will be a brilliant book. And I hope I can be part of this book. Dr. Getulio is a friend.  Someone I did not meet before these six years but someone who has been always a friend. Someone who  has called me daily on my cel phone to know how I was, when I begged to leave Hospital.

 

Thank you Dr. Getulio, Thank you.  I promised I will take the medicine everyday for as long as you believe it is fundamental. And I do understand that might be forever.

 

I add this part here because Dr. Getulio reminded me that I want to live well, that I want to stay in this world treating life as sacred.  I add this part here in order to thank all  of my dear friends who kept me grounded and whose work I believe is fundamental to the well being of so many in the world. I thank you Getulio Dare Rabello, Francesco Lombardi,  Laura Moriyama Silveira, Aquiles Paiva, Ivana Mendes, Camilla Amaral, Sara Al Saraf, Bruno Bueno, Cris Formiga,  Cristiano Sanna, Ilda Bondioli