Two years ago, someone tried to kill me – and here I am to tell the tale about it. Not to caution people so much as to share the gifts in what can only be described as a horrific story. And it happened to me, not as a helpless naïve young woman but just after I turned sixty, happily married, mother, stepmother, grandmother, creative, intuitive, sangoma. American born and South African by choice, I’d been around the block on both continents and had amassed quite a magic toolbox full of training and experience. I was trained in and practising all manner of trauma modalities, both practical and esoteric, life coaching, philosophy, energy work and traditional African spirituality to boot.
In short, I was as prepared for this – and as qualified as a professional could be for dealing with such a seriously damaging attack. And somehow, it happened.
It happened to me.
Ultimately, this tragic event? It would bring me the kind of learning which comes only from experience. Only from walking through fire. Only from rising from unimaginable depths.
I’ll tell you the story but let me preface it by saying I cannot answer the question you likely will have. Legalities prevent me from stating what may become obvious in terms of who poisoned me. And that’s fine, really, because the lessons learned are far more valuable than pointing fingers at the troubled soul who would inflict such incredible pain on another person.
Let’s start at the beginning. I woke up very early one morning, assuming I was in my own bed – only to hear the beeps and shuffled steps which clearly meant I was somewhere else. Those noises, added to the unmistakable feeling of a too full catheter bag backing up and the tugging of an IV drip line in my arm when I tried to roll over, told me I was in my least favourite place – the hospital. I’d spent far too many days of my life in those uncomfortable beds with the railings on the side, remote controls falling through to the floor, and while I’m grateful for the medical interventions, I’ve also experienced far too much already at the hands of allopathic medicine. Childhood surgeries in faraway hospitals faced without the presence of a parent, many rounds of pneumonia throughout my life, biopsies and subsequent removals of different cancers, a broken neck requiring fusion and more had left me highly traumatised both physically and mentally. Over the years, I’d invested a lot of time and money in my health to stay out of this arena. I’d felt much better, too, until this past year when I’d just not been well – and was unresponsive to alternative medicine which usually worked well for me.
But not so gravely ill as to be hospitalised, so that morning I began to panic, being back in this scenario, and the far too cheerful nurse who had woken me to take my blood pressure seemed quite alarmed. Then I saw the huge blotches of black and blue on my arms and my legs when she pulled back the covers, tasted blood and felt huge sores in my mouth and it all began to come back to me. As she adjusted the inflatable cuff on my other arm to triple-check her results, I started to search my foggy brain for any memories of how I’d gotten there.
The nurse introduced herself, as she noted my vitals on the oversized paper chart at the standing desk attached to the foot of my bed. She asked me “Do you know where you are?” and as I struggled to find words, she told me I was in the ICU of the local suburban hospital just down the hill from my home. She went on to say that I’d come into the Urgent Care yesterday with my friend, that I’d scared them all and she was glad to see me awake. “No one thought you would live, nobody lives through this. Thank God they were able to get you into theatre immediately!” I recalled then being on the surgery table under conscious sedation as they inserted stents in my kidneys to allow all the blood clots to pass and the feeling of relief as my organs could begin to work again. I’d learn later that they’d all begun to shut down – exactly as I’d felt, my body had begun to fail.
The cogs in my brain started to move and it all downloaded pretty quickly – the past several days had been painful and troubling. My body had seemed to be quitting on me, and overreacting to the simplest of things, like mozzie bites. Those would bleed profusely, the area around them becoming black and blue and then spreading into patches 5 centimetres or more in diameter. There had been sores in my mouth I’d never had before, growing in size and becoming more painful as my tongue swelled up and eventually turned black. I’d not been able to urinate normally for days and had had to soak in a warm tub of water to be able to pee at all. That’s what eventually led me to give up and acquiesce to my husband’s demands that I go to urgent care. The new integrative doctor I’d found who had been counselling me on Whatsapp over the weekend had said the same, that soon it would be too late, and so I’d leaned on my husband’s back in order to make it down the stairs from our bedroom, where I’d been largely in bed for several days. He half carried me, joking that it was a good thing I’d married a fireman, out of the house and into the car, seeming very relieved I’d finally agreed to go.
The days were a blur of being bathed like a child, poked and poked again for twice daily blood tests, IV drip sites being changed again and again as my body went through several hospital acquired infections requiring massive antibiotics. Christmas came and went in a fury of thunderstorms reflecting the environment in a ward full of staff and patients who didn’t want to be there. The doctor who admitted me from urgent care was not one I would have chosen and when things got to the point that she was medicating me while sleeping with drugs contraindicated by past experience despite agreeing not to, I had had enough. She had, in all this time, given me very little information, asking occasionally if we kept rat poison on our property. I answered her, as I had the same question from several nurses, saying no because we have kids and dogs. At one point, when I was a bit more clear, I asked if she was saying I’d been poisoned, and she shook her head no emphatically, saying “of course not!”.
After 2 ½ weeks in the ICU and seven infections along with multiple mishaps, I was considering checking myself out. I would have except for two things: given the holidays, the vital medication I needed to have at home was just not available and my growing concern about whether I’d be safe in my own house. It was clear I needed a physician I could talk to openly and so somehow I gathered the strength to initiate the switch. As New Year’s Eve approached, I asked a friend to help me switch doctors. When my new doctor and the hospital’s specialist doctor he brought in and called their “Dr House”, both vehemently agreed that I should be out of ICU as quickly as possible to prevent more infections and that I’d been given medications they didn’t understand, I burst into tears out of relief. They began working on getting me set up to go home where I wouldn’t be in danger of further superinfections, then made sure I was out of ICU and in a private room on a surgical ward. And that’s when my life really began to unravel.
I spent the night grateful to be out of the ICU but slept fitfully, wrestling with all that had happened and my sense of something being very wrong. The doctors were stunned that I’d lived through the ordeal given the amount of poison in my body and were very clear that they did not consider me safe yet. Going home to a house full of family and unanswered questions didn’t feel particularly restful and I laid awake in the wee hours trying to come up with a better, more restful solution.
I woke when my husband began messaging me on Whatsapp starting early in the morning, initially very happy I was coming home. Then a barrage of messages saying I didn’t trust him, that I didn’t think he wanted me to get better, to come home. Nonsensical things, and with an anger and a vitriol I’d never heard him have towards anyone, at least not sober.
That’s how quickly things changed. It got completely out of hand, fast. I closed my phone to give us both time to calm down, reminding him I wouldn’t be released if my BP was too high. The nurse came in to take my vitals and was shocked by those numbers. I meditated, visualised, used all the calming techniques I’d ever known and which had all made it possible for me to manage the last 18 days. Once I’d settled myself, we got a better result. The doctors stopped by and were incredibly clear that I had been deliberately poisoned with rat poison or Warfarin, which makes your body both bleed out and clot in ways that result in death. They asked if anyone other than me cooked at home – I’d told them I made all the meals for the family. And then they asked me if anyone made me tea, or coffee or smoothies, the common way to deliver this poison. And that told me all I needed to know.
They told me very slowly and clearly that I needed to “clean house”. That I shouldn’t use any bottles of liquid anything that had been opened, or consume any foods left in the house, or wear clothing I’d worn often. They suggested I even be careful about who was in the house when I was sleeping, saying that I couldn’t possibly be too careful in these next few weeks when I was to be on total bedrest. I wasn’t completely in the clear yet. They didn’t know how this recovery would go, given that it’s exceedingly rare to survive, that I should contact them with any concerns along the way. I could read between the lines, but just couldn’t address what I knew they were saying, what I could see clearly now. I didn’t want to lose my composure and risk being told to stay in hospital longer. All I wanted to do was go home, and yet home was going to have to change in so many ways, all at once.
I reopened my phone to find more awful messages and texted him that I couldn’t come home to such a hostile environment, that I needed him to please go to his mom’s for a few days so I could rest and that he should take both the girls as I wouldn’t be able to care for them. This unleashed more fury and I told him I’d find another place to stay. I called my daughter and asked for her help with that, and to come fetch me. Bless her, she got to me very quickly and I explained the situation. As we began to make a plan, a photo of his car’s dashboard and windscreen headed out of the driveway popped up on my Whatsapp with the words “I am leaving now.” We packed up my things and headed up the hill toward home.
I was wary, of course, yet it turned out he had left, but both the girls were still there and greeted me happily, along with my granddaughters. I am a very strong person and have lived a life overly dedicated to taking care of others, yet this made my heart sink. I just wasn’t capable of being a caretaker. For possibly the first time in my life, I knew I had to put myself first. And that wasn’t going to be easy.
All of them helped me get up the stairs – I was extremely weak and wobbly and my eldest was trying hard to sort out my medication schedule so the younger ones helped me get undressed and under the covers, the last born bringing me my water bottle. It was so poignant, these little women doing all they could to help when the one person who had sworn to love me for the rest of my days was absent. In retrospect, this was the day I knew, even in my beyond exhausted state, that I fundamentally had to change my life.
Until then, I had been a recovering perfectionist, an eldest child trained to care for everyone but herself. I internalised this very well as it was reinforced by abuse on many levels. Once I went through my own healing journey in my late 30’s, I found my way to self-compassion through talk therapy, somatic work, meditation and creative expression. It took more than a decade but by the time I accepted my calling and moved to South Africa in 2015, I was a wholly different person. Freed, liberated, and committed to being who I was rather than who I’d been told I should be. I knew, the minute my feet were on South African soil, that I was home.
My first few years here were spent in the Lebombo mountains of KwaZulu-Natal, in a very rural community which is extremely low in resources of all kinds. It was the middle of a four year draught and everything (and everyone) was stretched thin, it couldn’t have been more opposite of my privileged life in Washington DC. And yet, I was happy. Every single moment was a learning experience, physically being in a place I’d dreamt of all my life yet had no clue how to navigate. For the most part, I was accepted in inexplicable ways, welcomed by the majority and made an integral part of the local Zulu settlement. There were challenges, of course. There is no end to need and I quickly learned that even in my enthusiasm, I’d have to set boundaries in order to maintain my own equilibrium. My life lessons continued, just on a different canvas, and those years are shared in my memoir, UBIZO: A Story of Coming Home. Suffice it to say that I had plenty of practice in diving too deep and then having to save myself from drowning, having taken on too much. This would continue both personally and professionally, for years.
By the time I met the fireman, though, I thought I had a pretty good handle on things. I had deepened my relationship with my ancestors in ways that healed old wounds and built a strong safety net underneath me. My sangoma practice expanded and strengthened. All of this reflected in major improvements in my health and when that began to change shortly after we married, I assumed it was an adjustment period. We had grown our family, I had taken on familial responsibilities as a new makoti and it seemed natural that I might be tired. I’d never felt my age before but as I turned sixty in the midst of all this, my years seemed to be catching up with me. My decline and the accompanying changes in my body snuck up on me, to be honest, and before I knew it, there I was in that hospital bed.
Those first weeks and months after being discharged passed in a fog of medical appointments, legal matters, finding a new house. It was clear, given my husband’s complete change of character and ensuing anger, that the marriage was over and so I had to initiate a divorce as well as a protection order. We discovered traditional muthi on the property, the sort of black magic items meant to kill someone and in time it became clear that all of my healing tools had been tampered with. This meant burning everything in my traditonal round house where I practiced, something that I wasn’t sure I would recover from. My husband’s eldest daughter surprised me that first night I was home by saying she chose to stay with me permanently, so all that brought its own knots to be untied given our divorce just a few months after I came home. I’d been asked to be on bed rest for several weeks and reminded that, for months to come, I’d need as much sleep, nature’s greatest healer, as possible. I continued, as I had in hospital, to lean heavily on my magic toolbox. As one part of me felt extreme anxiety – how would I ever trust anyone again? – another would answer from a higher perspective. Breathwork and reiki kept my blood pressure low, meditation helped me release the life I had planned, prayer supported it all and helped me to remember that all is well. They are called practices for a reason, and the wisdom in the simplest of tools astounded me regularly. While I am immensely grateful for the wonderful professionals who also supported me in myriad ways, through all of this I learned that, ultimately, I must heal myself.
In the second year of recovery, I added yoga nidra to the mix, bringing body/mind/soul back together a bit like the shadow being stitched to the body in Peter Pan. As my mind cleared, I was able to release the future I’d planned for. Finding ways to be grateful for the smallest of things brought bigger, better and brighter days. Regular spiritual sessions and making time to listen to my inner knowing allowed me to trust that, just maybe, what was to come would be better than I could imagine in my humanness. I discovered something else, too. While I’d worked with self-compassion internally and externally for decades and believed it was the key to healing on multiple levels, I had missed the end game. While healing is good and necessary, in time I found it to be the path to sovereignty rather than the ultimate goal itself. It became clear that if I believed that all human beings are sovereign, so must I be. And if I am sovereign, how could I not take care of myself, first and foremost?
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Yet all of us, as humans, are so immersed in the cultures of this world that we forget the basics like sovereignty. The powers that be, those who want to run the world, they have created a structure that leads us to believe we are only cogs in the machine. We forget our own magnificence and we are taught that the opposite is true. We learn the lessons well, in order to fit in, to belong.
And more than two years down the road now, that’s where my own growth is happening. My body is happier, thanks to the carnivore way of eating, major detoxing and lymphatic work. All of that sort of thing helps, but honestly, the magic is in tending my own light. As I do this, the future looks brighter and brighter and I wonder if this is exactly what the world needs from us all, right now.
I am truly grateful for it all. I wouldn’t be who I am today without having walked through this particular fire. It refined me, and continues to temper me much as gold is when it passes through the fire. It is alchemy, pure and simple. To expect life to be different is both naive and ludicrous. This is what I came here for, I know that know on the deepest level, and it serves both me and those whose lives I touch.
I hope my story reminds us all that the shadow brings great light, when we allow it to. Perhaps the poison really is the cure.
