Self-help books are counted among the top bestsellers on the market. These top 10 bestsellers describe the experience of terminal illness, and seemingly echo the next book of that genre. In this writer's opinion, they teem with secular resolutions interpreted as spiritual edification. Plus the outcomes produced can be diverse and out of character for us human creatures. Unspoken celestial law dictates “there is a reason for all things”.

But with a terminal illness such as breast cancer there may be a reason and is this reasoning always a victory?
I closed the book, The Song that Never Ended with the understanding that what we perceive to be the end of life is really the beginning of something unfathomable. Here was a book, documenting a victory embraced. a book, not fiction but with a 'heroine' and you know what? She died.

I was anxious to dive into the prolific mind of the jazz-fusion keyboardist, John Novello, also author of The Song that Never Ended. He'd captured a reality of the breast cancer his wife, virtuoso jazz singer Gloria Rusch 'pulled away' from in January 2000. And so i began.
 
Paula: Fight or flight?

John: “Oh there's no doubt that it was fight,” adding that the first diagnosis was 'benign,' that is, 'not dangerous to one's health, non-recurrent or not progressive'. However, still governed by the instinct of fight or flight, an instinct which dictates to our psyches what to do when survival is threatened, John was still leery. In the subliminal mind we visit either end of the spectrum of emotions, either recoiling with trepidation or marshalling forces.

I n the book, John notes that he was angry with Gloria the day she discovered the lumps in her breasts. I asked if he'd questioned whether or not it was due to negligence on Gloria's part?

John: “She'd said, she'd checked… 40 or 50 days ago.” Going on to explain that some cancers are so aggressive that even with routine self-examination they aren't detected. Gloria's were deeply rooted and had grown to 2 centimeters in size since her last self-examination.

Paula: Your book mentions, 'allopathic medicine,' what is that?

John: “It tends to treat disease by attacking it either in the form of removing which is surgery or with toxic poisons we call drugs — antibiotics, radiation, chemotherapy etc - or by suppressing and masking symptoms with pain killing drugs such as non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS)”. He gave an allegory to the term used by western medicine. “the messenger is the symptom… hopefully you don't kill me by taking Tylenol that gets me out of the picture and then you don't know what the message is… holistic medicine asks the question.”
 
John and Gloria found the choices provided by western and holistic medicines to be “maddening”. as advocates of 'holistic practice' they believed 'an imbalance of the body was what caused illnesses'. Ultimately, the chosen methods came by friends who, through 'holistic treatments' had some success.

One treatment took them to Bajanor Hospital, in Mexico...

Gloria underwent intravenous immune system treatment that consisted of laetrile, hydrogen peroxide, shark cartilage, hoxsey, polypeptides and germanium, along with special vitamin c and b complex shots and other supplements and immune system-building substances. He believed the treatment could have been successful had her condition been caused by a dysfunctional immune system.

The couple tried the NAET or Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Technique. In his book, John writes, “NAET reprograms the brain to stop its unnecessary allergic reaction to things that are beneficial or harmless so the immune system is freed up to effectively tackle or react to one of the  'biggest' threats of them all — cancer.”

One of the most costly treatments was at the Klinik Benediktusquelle in Ortenburg, Germany. integrated with low dosages of chemotherapy and a hyperthermic procedure (the heating of the body to 105°) would supposedly kill cancer cells completely. The cost-$20,000. but there was a problem: two mis-diagnoses. the main tumors were not removed because one doctor felt them to be dangerously large. Had they been removed the treatment may have fought the remaining cancer successfully. Later, a third diagnosis revealed that the tumors could have first been debulked and made smaller via radiation. Of course it was too late at this point and the tumors were cantaloupe size.

At one point gloria's anticancer diet appeared to be starving her body. The diet was mainly fruits, vegetables, raw foods and juices with very little meat to minimize protein intake. The concept was that proteins feed cancer. She was undergoing radiation treatments' and had begun drinking a tea made from a plant grown in the rainforests of Puerto Rico called dragonfly tea.

My inner voice had not been silent. From the beginning, it had conveyed to me the message that Gloria's illness was somehow meant to be, that she would not survive this cancer. It had intimated that Gloria and I could choose to make the most of this illness by accepting it as a spiritual test that, on some higher level of reality, we had chosen to experience in this lifetime in order to learn an important spiritual lesson. John Novello, a man who taught Balthasar Getty how to convincingly play piano in Paul Haggis' film red hot, has written a book. It is an intuitive oeuvres revealing a dimension where 'love' doesn't die when the body is lent to breast cancer — an `etude cadenced by the threat of devastation but complexioned in victory.
 
The Song that Never Ended is available online at a 20% discount for immediate delivery from the Secured Site ORDER OUR BOOKS page at the New Paradigm Books website at www.newpara.com