The Hassons’ Odyssey
My dearest friends and family. I have not been in contact or available for some time. Me and Lies have been in Europe from the 28th of July until the 15th of September and we have lived an Odyssey of our own, an Odyssey that engulfed us and absorbed us fully with twists and turns that kept us hanging on for the ride and both unable and unwilling to allow anything else to enter our consciousness, even about our loved ones. I felt that it would be interesting to share our Odyssey with you guys. So here it goes:
1. PRELUDE: The story actually starts a lot earlier, almost two years to be exact, in the November 2019 Sculpting Extravaganza– a Free event that we offered, a whole month of sculpting, for participants an opportunity to live with us for a month, learn how to sculpt and experience the TierraMitica way of life and interaction. We were doing all the sculpting of Umbala, our sculpted playground that is playable as a board game, so we sculpted five continents, the North and South poles, a magician‘s dungeon, Aladin and the genie, the seven dwarves and many more magical settings, intermixed with slides and chutes and rope climbing and games of skill as well as puzzles. It was to be, and is, our proudest creation!
A few days into the event, I slipped on wet grass one morning and hurt my back to a degree that obliged me to remain bedridden throughout the rest of the event but also for several months after. It cut off completely my ability for exercise and exacerbated heart issues that I had already been experiencing since the beginning of that year. I concentrated on being able to walk and be mobile again, and also to manage the pain and become able to work in the advanced workshop of February 2020 and the ChoiceOS Mythic Voyage in March right afterwards. My health, however, was continuously deteriorating. And then the coronavirus thing abruptly hit us, just a couple of days after the end of the workshop, and all realities changed. We got locked in in TierraMitica, together with three argonauts that were left here, and there were others who had not gotten out of Peru fast enough who remained sequestered in their hotels or airbnbs in Tarapoto, Lima and elsewhere.
Suddenly, it was practically impossible to seek any medical attention, the hospitals full of covid cases but also mainly the whole Peruvian society in an uncontrollable panic. But heart failure incidents and strokes had become frequent and part of my everyday life.
TierraMitica shut down completely like everything else and as the months went by and we had to cancel workshop after workshop, the one in Joshua Tree in California, then one here, then another, then the one on Lesvos island in Greece, then everything else indefinitely as lockdowns and draconian restrictions of everything took over the world. Schools closed, shops closed, all sports closed, all concerts, events, seminars, everything closed down. With my health constantly deteriorating, I concentrated on preserving TierraMitica, our way of life, to survive not only economically and practically but also emotionally and psychologically. Most of us would find the opportunity to visit our countries, family and friends in combination with the USA and Europe workshops, and others were planning trips. All that was no longer possible.
Our workers had left with the quarantine in March, so we had to step up, take over maintenance, construction, all repairs, and we did that fine. It kept everybody except me physically active and healthy, taught us that we could achieve anything, gave us confidence and a much deeper sense of community. But we also wrote, performed and recorded (at extremely low quality using just phones) a two hour musical with original songs by every single TierraMitican, we built an amazing Jungle Book themed fire pit area in ancient temple ruins and built a yellow submarine themed pool area. We even managed to find an opportunity of temporary relaxation of restrictions and slid out of our cocoon for a group vacation in Mancora, a beach area in the northern border of Peru, a two day drive each way that we did in convoy. All in all, we had a better time in the lock downs than most, being in family and community constantly, hugging, dancing, socializing maskless in our paradise.
2.GETTING OUT OF COVID: By December 2020 travel by plane from Lima had been reinstated, albeit needing COVID tests, masks, shields and all kinds of regulations and also entry into Peru was possible once more, with a 14 day quarantine. This allowed us to try to hold an advanced workshop at the end of January, down payments for which by loving and trusting Argonauts had kept us eating and paying our bills in the second half of 2020. We also decided to hold the Mythic Party 7, the foremost institution and event of TierraMitica, with whoever could make it. In a hair raising, suspense ridden pirouette with many countries regulations at the same time, announcements changing realities with new restrictions every couple of days, we got 19 people here, with a couple of casualties in a last minute UK lock down. They all “quarantined” with us in TierraMitica.
It was amazing to be with other people again, especially with people we love deeply. Both the party and the workshop went spectacularly well and the advanced was by far the best ever and a level up. It was followed by another ChoiceOS, a very adventurous one and then a second advanced in May 2021 filled with all of those who couldn’t come in the first one, plus others who had heard how WOW the previous was. It was even better, super powerful and we had an awesome time! This activity, although with less workshops than any other year, kept us ticking. We had another ChoiceOS planned for August, all was good again. We saw people again, things were opening up. By this time however, my heart was in such a condition that I couldn’t take ten steps without running out of breath and becoming drenched in sweat. For the last year and before, I had been preparing for the possibility of my death in order to ensure the survival of TierraMitica, this amazing, social, political. anthropological experiment for happiness that has helped so many people, but has also created a tightly knit family among the TierraMiticans, the people who live here and who have made it their life task to constantly evolve and experiment on the human psyche for the pursuit of happiness.
Despite the closure of all public offices due to COVID, I managed to untangle a lot of the paperwork surrounding TierraMitica and to gift her to the TierraMiticans, giving them stock according to seniority and other factors, and my wife Lies who together with Aura and Simon would be the trustees, the board of directors of TierraMitica. This ensured a succession without a hitch, minimal formalities and gave them full signature rights to authorities, banks and all legal entities. I also had been withdrawing from management for more than two years, and TierraMiticans were already running everything efficiently and successfully on their own anyway. Training for the workshops had intensified, but also training in the art of keeping people happy in everyday life, through thick and thin. I had prepared everybody and done everything I could for the eventuality of my death, including psychological preparation for all concerned, but with Europe timidly opening up, some money that unexpectedly and magically appeared out of the blue, both to me and to Lies, and the fact of my survival through all this time without medical attention or time dedicated to my heart the eventuality of actually living and fixing my health timidly surfaced. I felt the probabilities and pounced decisively; I postponed the ChoiceOS Mythic Voyage from August to October and set my eyes on taking advantage of the summer holiday weakening of restrictions and decided to aim for August to fly to Europe and have surgery on my heart.
I contacted Willem, heart surgeon extraordinaire, old Argonaut, dear friend and head professor and general director of the most amazing cardiology hospital, the University hospital of Utrecht in the Netherlands, a friend who had saved my life seven years prior. He immediately volunteered to help me in any way he could and arranged a diagnostic virtual meeting with Martin, a cardiologist he trusted to take good care of me for Thursday, July 22nd. He told me that very likely I might need full open heart surgery, and that according to my symptoms I should be very careful. He told me that he was going on vacation on the 7th of August. That left a very small window. I had already managed to get double vaccinated in Peru, being a senior citizen with health problems. Many health problems. Heart problems, respiratory problems, diabetes and my anti phospholipid syndrome, the cause of everything. I was going to fly to Lima for some immigration document requirements Monday the 26th. What if I flew directly, arrived in the Netherlands on the 28th, took advantage of a new regulation that had been issued just two days before that allowed for only a five day quarantine with a negative test on the fifth day, and was free on Monday, 1st of August to enter the holiday hospital for tests. Could he arrange everything to receive me on the 1st of August? Yes, he said, and off we were, changing our tickets back from Lima, buying new ones for the 28th to Amsterdam, booking a hotel to quarantine, arranging PCR tests and wrapping up our responsibilities and lives in TierraMitica in a decision made in fractions of a second. The Odyssey began. GAME ON!
3.THE VOYAGE BEGINS: To meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same! (from the poem IF, by Ruddyard Kippling). The trip went well. We arrived in Lima in the afternoon of Monday the 26th, the next morning we took care of our chores and flew right out the same evening. Any flight as long as this is both dangerous and uncomfortable for a guy with my issues and high risks of thrombosis, but I had at least secured a KLM document, signed by a doctor, that allowed me to fly maskless, a requirement for the trip to happen since with my level of oxygenation it was unlikely that I could survive more than 14 hours in a plane wearing a mask. We arrived at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam the afternoon of the 28th of July and had the pleasure of my eldest son Spyro picking us up at the airport with his new princess, Marlene. They took us shopping for supplies for our quarantine and delivered us to our hotel for our five (hopefully) quarantine days. On the morning of Monday the 2nd of August we passed our covid test and went straight to the hospital. After spending the day doing all the tests, I was booked to do an angiography the next day. The angiography is actually a surgical operation, same as an angioplasty (that I had done 7 years ago) where they insert catheters through an artery in your groin, pass it through your lungs into the heart and then by using microscopic balloons or even drills (the comic book sounding rotablator!), they open up your clogged coronary arteries to receive a tube, called a stent, that undertakes the task of keeping it open while allowing flesh to grow on it. The purpose of the angiography however was to be entirely diagnostic in preparation for open heart surgery since my condition seemed pretty bad, and a serious heart flutter had been diagnosed in addition to all the other issues. Just to see and record what exactly were the issues.
TRIUMPH! During the angiography a full diagnosis was made, that my previous three long stents turning my right hand side coronary artery into Full Metal Jacket were in good condition, and so were my valves. My issues were because of a new stenosis, this time in my left coronary artery and quite low down. The diagnosis done, it was clear that bypass surgery would be required, since this is a place where it is very difficult to insert stents with an angioplasty. But the Universe, in full allignment, inspired the surgeon to call a meeting of all the doctors, declaring that although seemingly impossible, he believed he could fix it right then and there!
His confidence inspiring also Willem and Martin, he started a long, super uncomfortable process of breaking through my artery with more and more catheters and high tech balloons until he managed to insert two stents and repair my blood flow! No open heart surgery required, no days in the ICU, no month and a half long and painful recovery and a fraction of the anticipated cost! How good can it get? Next day…
DISASTER! I feel like shit, because the atrial flutter has just come into center stage and I have the same, or even worse, symptoms than before.
Lesson in heart anatomy: the heart has four chambers, two atria in the top part, connected by valves with two ventricles in the bottom part. The right atrium takes deoxygenated blood from your system, sends it to the right ventricle that sends it to the lungs to pick up oxygen. The pulmonary veins then send the oxygenated blood to the left atrium that passes it down to the left ventricle that sends it to the brain for oxygenation. The right atrium receives the electrical signal that determines its beat and directs all the other chambers accordingly. An atrium flutter was described to me as a multitude of extra electrical signals circulating around the valve between the right atrium and its ventricle raising the beat to maybe 300 beats per minute, ensuring that the rest of the heart cannot follow and causing it to stop, or rather constantly stutter. Not a very good idea! So, not to worry, they are going to perform a Cardio-version on me and fix it, which is really cool:
They stick big rectangular electrodes on your chest and on your back and then they drug you (with probably the most powerful psychotropic in the world) and put you completely under, unconscious for 20-30 seconds. During this time they literally jump start your heart with a big electroshock and they immediately wake you up. I ask them whether it hurts, and they say no, you are unconscious, but what hurts is the bikini wax you get on your back and chest when they unstick the giant rectangular adhesive electrodes. I am incredulous! Do you actually do that to people? You put them under for seconds, you wake them and instantly strip gigantic stickers from their chest and back? Mercy, I say, and make them promise to take the stickers off before they wake me! This happens on the 4th of August, the day after my surgery.
TRIUMPH! It works, and my heart is beating at the normal rythm! No more flutter! I leave the hospital and go to the hotel with Lies, happy and breathing well without the opression. This weekend Martin, the cardiologist I was assigned to, leaves for Greece for his summer vacation. Things look fine, and we are happy we got things fixed so easily. If only we knew!
The next few days I am recovering, taking it easy but also trying to achieve the goal Willem had given me: to walk 10,000 steps a day back to health and to heal my diabetes. Even if you start at 500, you can work yourself up to it, even if it takes you some time, he assured me. I started with 1200, went to 2000 the next day, up to 3000, 5000 and even managed 7000 steps one day. It was very easy to do, since we had picked a hotel that was next to a kind of park area with canals, lakes and a multitude of easy paths.
DISASTER! I know that I am not well. I am pushing myself, hoping for the best, telling myself that things need time, but I am not well. I wake up in the night sweating with a huge bear paw on my chest cutting my breath in the middle of the night. Walking becomes more difficult every day instead of easier. I feel more and more an oppression on my chest impeding my breath. Tuesday the 10th we have a programmed visit for checkup in the hospital. The checkup would be performed by a young cardiologist replacing Martin. The tests show immediately that the flutter is there, and my heart is dancing uncontrollably. The doctor decides that he will increase the sotalol, my arythmia medication and give me another Cardio-version in two days, allowing some time for the medication to act.
After 10 days in the same hotel, the Star Lodge near the hospital, we had booked an Airbnb near Amsterdam for 4 days. Metsa, a TierraMitican that has left since two years and living in Sweden is visiting us and we are to meet him in Amsterdam. We are all packed with our luggage in the rented car, going straight to our Airbnb after the checkup. And two days later, when theoretically I would have been well, Lies has arranged to go by train to Belgium to see her family and get the first dose of the vaccine, hoping to do the 2nd one before we travel back to Peru. Now I have to do a Cardio-version! I insist that she goes as planned to not lose the opportunity. Maybe Metsa can accompany me. We drive about an hour and a half to our new home. It is horrible and nothing like it was described. The owner is a weird middle aged man that lives above and to the side of our little apartment, we are prohibited from entering, exiting or even openning the front door for some obscure reason, entry is through the garage in the back, there is an adjoining door that we have no way of locking in front of our bed, there is no ventilation except a tiny crack in an inclining window and the guy is a creep lurking about. We deposit our things and go to Amsterdam for dinner and to meet up with Metsa. After a fun dinner with the requisite joints, we return to sleep in our Airbnb. With Metsa lodging in a hotel nearby. We wake up in a suffocating atmosphere in the room. We decide on the spot to lose our money and leave the next day, Lies taking the train to Belgium, a 4 hour ride, and me and Metsa moving back to Utrecht, check in the Star Lodge once more and going for the Cardio-version, supposed to happen later that day, Monday the 12th. We leave the Airbnb, pick up Metsa and go for a ride to the seaside, seeing it is a really sunny day. Later in the day we meet for lunch with Tomas and Alexandra who are passing through on their way to Barcelona and want to see us. In the evening, Spyro drives all the way to have dinner with us and also see Metsa. We have a great day, our first holiday!
The night at the Airbnb is horrible. We wake up very early to pack our things and I am literally suffocating. My heart is worse than ever. I take Lies to the train although she is reluctant to meet me, and pick up Metsa. It is early in the morning and he is already dead stoned and in his world (understandable, having passed the night in Amsterdam) but I am not well and struggling to drive to Utrecht, then to the hotel, leave our stuff and rush to the hospital since they call me and want me to be there before 11am. Entering the hospital I take the wrong elevator and cannot find the place I am supposed to be at. At last, exhausted, drenched with sweat I manage to find the place, I lie down on a hospital bed and they give me all the tests, they take blood, ECG, etc. and we then wait for a few hours since the anaesthesiologist has been detained and is late. Eventually, at about 2:30pm, they come and the Cardio-version, the familiar super trippy electroshock happens.
TRIUMPH! It works, my heart is back into sinus rythm, we leave with renewed optimism. We go to the hotel, I rest and in the evening Lies arrives. Her parents have kindly brought her by car, only a two and a half hours drive. She has gotten her vaccine. And she is happy to be back and to see me well. The next day we spend the morning walking with her parents and having lunch and in the evening we go out with Spyro who drove over from Delft, Willem‘s son Paul, another Argonaut and Metsa who is leaving the next day. I am fine during dinner, we laugh and celebrate. Finally, we have one more day in Holland and on the 15th we are flying out to Greece to see my mom, my son Alex and go on holiday. On the 14th, we have invited Willem and Jeanette to diner, to spend time and thank them for their amazing love and hospitality. Jeanette had an operation of her own on the same day as me, 3rd of August, and we are both recovered. Life is Gooood!
DISASTER! After a day and a half of being well, I wake up in the early hours drenched in sweat and in full flutter right away. Once more, I cannot breathe. I tell Willem during dinner and he takes action. He suggests to me to do an ablation, a complicated surgical procedure with similarities to angioplasty but that will require for me to go into general anaesthesia. Basically, through catheters entering my groin, they will direct electrodes inside my right atrium and then create scar tissue around the valve using heat (although dr. Loh, the specialist that Willem suggested detests this term, he uses it himself) to burn areas of heart tissue, creating lesions that stop the electrical energy from circulating. The operation has dangers, as any operation, mainly the dangers of thrombosis in view of my syndrome, but is deemed to be close to 100% successful. He undertakes to talk to dr.Loh and secure a surgery date on my behalf, that would hopefully be as soon as possible, a difficult task since he is very busy and fully booked. I decide to do it, since I seem to be worse than ever! I also decide that we should fly to Greece the next day anyway. I find no point to stay waiting around, potentially for weeks, waiting for a date and spending money in expensive Holland. I want to see my 85 year old mother, I want to swim, I want to feel like a human being, even if feeling sick.
4.THE ODYSSEY GOES HOME:
The trip is uneventful. We see my mom, have dinner with Alex and his girlfriend Mandy who is really cool and we like her, plus we go twice to the beach with Alex to swim and bond and eat nice seafood. Lies does some shopping, and so do I. Despite my bad health, we are having a vacation. We spend our 3 nights in Athens in a nice Airbnb with a garden and leave the morning of Thursday the 18th with my mothers little Toyota Yaris and drive 3 hours towards the ferry to Zakynthos, a beautiful Ionian Sea island with Venetian castles, influence, cuisine and architecture. The ferryboat is packed, and so is the island, and we have made no booking. Although it is the middle of the high season we do not expect to have trouble finding a place due to covid. We are wrong! I have never seen a Greek island wall to wall in rental cars before. Nonetheless, we accidentally see a beautiful 4 star hotel and we ask the price. They only have a room for two days and it is 200 euros, too much money for us. On a whim we decide to take it. It has buffet breakfast and dinner, a beautiful sandy private beach and many pools. Plus we are tired. We need some pampering.
TRIUMPH! We are having a holiday! We love it! The breakfast is beyond imagination good, the beach is idylic and momentarily we forget the medical issues, although I have issues breathing almost continuously. We are well, we make love, we swim, we sleep. We do not leave the hotel during the next two days and our spirits are up. We leave the morning of the 20th to find another place. By now it is the weekend and everything is booked except in noisy places we don’t like. We drive around, we have a fight in the immense heat and tiredeness ( it only lasts a couple of minutes thankfully!) plus we receive an email that we have to be in Utrecht on Sunday the 23rd the latest because my ablation is scheduled for Monday the 24th at 7am. We stop looking or a place and go to the port to get tickets for the ferry for the 23rd in the morning and there are no places.
DISASTER! Everything is booked! Unbefuckinglievable! We look for the 22nd, there is place only something like 6am. We decide to leave on the spot, scared that we will not be able to get off the island in time. We cannot afford to not be there for our slot Monday morning, we have been warned that there will not exist another spot anytime soon. Plus, we are turned off by the amount of tourists on the island. It seems all of Europe, fed up with lockdowns came to Greece, the only place to have relaxed covid regulations, the only choice. They have more tourism than in 2019! We get a ferryboat that night and arrive at a cheap hotel on the road around midnight, exhausted. Our holiday is over, our mood is different, we book tickets back to Holland and then back to Greece, it is hugely expensive but cheaper than changing our existing tickets. We spend the next two nights in a hotel in Athens incognito, because we dont want my mom to know about all the medical stuff. We leave her Yaris in the airport long term parking with our big suitcase in it. We will travel back to the Netherlands with our carry ons. We are focused to getting there, we need tests again, traveller forms again. We fly back to Amsterdam, take another rental car and back to the Star Lodge hotel. We go to the hospital 7am, more tests, blood, thorax Xrays, ECGs, and eventually I go into surgery.
TRIUMPH! I wake up from the operation with a sore throat from the intubation, painful peeing from the catheter and a dizzy head. I am told the operation is an 100% success. My atrial flutter has disappeared! Hallelujah! All is good! I am supposed to rest, to lift nothing for a couple of weeks, my arythmia medication is stopped, the Odyssey seems to have ended.
DISASTER! Just one day after I wake up at 5am sweating like a pig and a huge oppression on my chest, worse than ever. I contact the hospital and go to the emergency room. Tests again and the news are: My flutter indeed is no longer there, but something worse has appeared, atrial fibrillation. This is a similar thing to the flutter, only originating on the left atrium and coming from electricity around the pulmonary veins. I am put back on the arythmia medication, this time at a much bigger dosage. In the afternoon, I am given another Cardio-version, another crazy trippy electroshock to kick start the heart.
TRIUMPH! It works, my heart is in sine wave again! Next day…
DISASTER! The fibrillation is back with a vengeance! Dr. Loh suggests I do another ablation, a way more tricky one, in this one they have to enter my groin under general anaesthesia again, get the catheters to my right atrium and then puncture a hole in the wall between the right and left atriums and then cauterize the skin around the pulmonary veins, again to create scar tissue that will not allow the electrical impulses to travel through it. This one, however, will be more expensive and way more dangerous. To start with, in the first one if clots appear they are absorbed by the lungs, but in this one, if there is clotting it can go directly to the brain and cause an embolism. In addition, it has between 60-80% probabilities of success. If it does not work I can have another and correct whatever wasn’t covered the first time. He suggests taking the higher dosages of sotalol for a week and see if I can live with the results, hoping that the fibrilation will be somehow controlled by the drug. I ask him whether he would find me a date between the 9th and 15th of September, the dates I have tickets from Athens and back to Lima respectively. He says he will do his best and believes it can be possible. I ask him what he would advise me if I was his brother. He says to do the second ablation, but best to first try the sotalol for a week. I agree. Next day we fly back to Greece. Our mood is down, Lies is scared and dissapointed and in no mood for vacation but I insist we must make the best of the situation and not stay even one night in Athens. Where would you like to go, I ask her? Crete, she says, I have always wanted to visit Crete! So, I book us a ferry boat with a cabin for an overnight passage. It leaves at 10 pm from the port of Pireaus. We arrive at the airport at 4:35pm. The plan is to take the car, go see my mom and brother who will be visiting from the US with his wife, neither of which have we informed about any of this, stay a couple of hours and then rush to the airport. I call her to see if she will be there avoiding all questions, since I have not decided yet what or how much I will tell her. She informs me that my brother Alex, who lives in the US did not arrive as expected a couple of days ago, and is arriving at 5:30pm from Frankfurt. I will go pick him up, I joyfully declare! Lies is stunned. We have the little Toyota filled to the brim with our stuff and they are coming for almost two months. How will we ever fit inside. and how will we manage all this and get on the ferry on time? Trust me, I ask of her, this is what we need to do, many birds with one stone, everything will work out.
TRIUMPH! Everything indeed does magically and effortlessly work out. My brother is pleasantly surprised that I went to pick him up, since he knew I was on holiday in Zakynthos. At least until I explained the whole story, that we were already at the airport, the story with my operations and the fact that we had all to fit in the miniscule Yaris with our luggage on our laps, like sardines in a can. All is good, we manage to squeeze in for the 30 minute ride. We tell the story in the car. I tell him that I think I should tell Suzy the truth, or almost the truth, tell her all that happened except the part where I have to do another, more tricky intervention. He agrees; Suzy, our mom maybe old but she is more clever than a fox. By now she might have figured that my vagueness is suspicious and she might be worrying even more. We get there about 6:30pm and before 9pm we are gone, racing to the port, finding the office to get our printed tickets, getting in the boat and after some food in the ferry restaurant and a little time on deck to feel the sea we retire to our cabin at midnight, to be awakened abruptly with a knock on the door and loudspeaker announcements at 6 in the morning. Without even time for a coffee we find ourselves driving towards a slowly awakening Chania. We stop for coffee and a sausage pie. Life looks good once more. My health situation is not good at the moment, it is hard to breathe, but it is the two of us on a road trip, we are happy as we can be following all the stress.
5. THE ODYSSEY LANDS IN CRETE: We decide to drive west, an area of many spectacular sandy beaches. It is early in the morning and the colors of sunrise are spectacular, the scenery ancient, rugged and magnificent, our drive is glorious. As we move further and further west, we realize how much we have underestimated the tourist invasion of Greece, the whole of Europe, maybe the wrold, having descended upon Greece as the only place welcoming tourists after more than a year of lockdowns, travel prohibitions and fearmongering.
DISASTER! We cannot find anywhere decent to stay so we drive further and further west to the famous beaches of Falaserna, Balos and more, but to no avail. Everything is booked or not a place we want to chill in. More sausage rolls later, we decide to head back to Chania and then continue south to Sfakia to see some real traditional Cretans, something Lies has been wanting to do ever since I told her tales about them. The real live super macho Sfakiotes, a tribe of stern, austere warrior mountain people. After a long but beautiful drive through the mountains we arrive at the town of Sfakia that has become a tourist destination since I last saw it maybe twenty years ago. There are more cars than in the busiest city center, tourist buses and groups everywhere, tour guides, shops, tourist traps everywhere. Not a single Sfakiotis in traditional dress, not a single Sfakiotis period. Maybe there are not even real Cretans there anymore of any description. By now it is the early afternoon and we have been on the road since 6 am. We leave immediately and decide to drive the southern coast of Crete westwards to find a place with a beach to stay. We alternate driving with Lies who is keen to practice, apprehensive to drive in Peru in bad roads among suicidal mototaxis. It is only in the evening that we finally find a place to stay near the village of Schinos in a little apartment in front of the sea, albeit a couple of kilometers away from the beach and the tourist action.
TRIUMPH! We go out for a beautiful dinner in a taverna right on the sea, we sleep well, go to the beach, make love in our airconditioned bedroom, have another great dinner, we are officially on holiday! We have no news about a day for the second ablation, but we have plenty of time. Our plan is to spend another week in Crete, take the ferry on the 5th of September to arrive in Athens the morning of the 6th, spend 6th, 7th and 8th in Athens, see more of my sons, my mother, meet with friends, do sundry jobs that are necessary and then fly back to the Netherlands on the 9th , do the operation hopefully on the 10th or so and depending on the outcome leave for Lima on the 15th or extend our stay as required by the medical circumstances. Despite my breathing difficulty and often distress, we are in a good mood and at last relaxing from all the stress. We leave Schinos after two days, mainly because it has become too windy to swim. We have booked a little bungalow in an estate in the mountains near Herakleion, a beautiful city in the mid north area with an amazing old venetian port and picturesque cobblestone streets. Although it is not by the sea, we want to chill away from tourism and just use the pool and enjoy the cooler mountain air. It is a great choice, the triumph continues, we have a great time and are only about 40 minutes from the city, allowing us to have gourmet dinners while totally relaxing in the pool during the days. After 2 days, we move north west to a touristy 4 star all inclusive hotel after exploring the west edges of the Cretan coast. We made this choice to find at last a sandy beach with no big waves and a place of comfort. It is a little too expensive for us, but it includes more buffet meals than you have time for and a luxurious, easy environment. It is a hit, we have it booked for two days but are planning to extend it until we leave Crete. We are happy to relax and make love on our king sized airconditioned bed with a 50 inch tv to watch movies on, take a stroll to the sandy beach with loungers and umbrellas for the sun and enjoy extravagant breakfasts. We are super well, spooning and snoring during our first night there.
DISASTER! An email from the surgeon, dr. Loh, pings at 1:45 am during a sleepwalking piss. There are no available dates at all between the 9th and the 15th, there is a servicing of the surgical hall, a lack of anaesthesiologist and other eventualities that make the operation impossible. There is only one slot, on the 7th of September, but I have to be at the hospital 8am the morning of the 6th for a heart tomography, meaning we have to be in Holland on the 5th. The only other possible dates are at the end of September, forcing us to stay another month at huge expense in the Netherlands and endangering the probability of being able to carry out the October 10th ChoiceOS Mythic Voyage. Disaster indeed! Wide awake now, we try to change our flights from the 9th to the 5th and our ferry from the 5th to the 3rd, the day after tomorrow. No more vacation, no time in Athens, only a day for the basics, but is it possible? It almost is not!
6. THE ODYSSEY FLIES BACK TO HOLLAND: The KLM site is not working, the prices of flights are double than what we paid for the return trip just to change the return, there seem to be no cabins or car spots on any ferry from any of the three ports, we are trying to contact people all through the night to secure the trip. Around 5am of the sleepless night Lies manages to contact a helpful person at KLM and we manage to change our tickets for the 5th at huge cost. Unable to do anything over the phone or on the internet about the ferry, we catch a couple of hours of sleep with the plan to go to the Minoan Lines Ferryboats company headquarters in Herakleion that open at 9am. This is not so helpful because we are informed that due to the swarms of tourists there are no overnight cabins available on any boat, anytime from any port. We book our car for 10pm from Chania on the 3rd and plan to go early hoping to find a cabin from a cancellation last moment in the port, else we will travel all night on seats. No big deal, but not pleasant under my health issues. Having done all that we can to ensure we get to the surgery, we return to the hotel for our last day of vacation.
TRIUMPH! Next day we have a great last swim, get tested for the trip (you need fresh tests for every flight and ferryboat ride, we have done so many by now!), find a cabin, arrive in Athens, have a nice family lunch, do some shopping for greek spices, sponges and sundry items, see frantically some friends for dinner, have breakfast with my younger son Alex, get a taxi tothe airport, arrive after a delay late at night, get our rental car from the airport, drive to Utrecht, get some sandwitches to eat from a late night gas station, get to the Star Lodge hotel after midnight, sleep a few hours and report to the hospital for my pre operation heart tomography at 8am.
All goes well and the next morning we are at the hospital at 7am for pre operative blood tests, chest xrays, ECGs etc and before 11am I am taken for the operation. I awaken as before with a scratchy throat from the intubation, great back pain from the immobility (I am to stay immobile until after midnight to keep pressure on the artery) and informed that it is 5pm, that the operation lasted many hours due to the complexity but that it was successful! All the trials and tribulations seem like nothing since we managed to do everything that could be done for my health. During the hours of the night in the hospital my atrial fibrillation reappears with a vengeance and an intense super painful burning sensation on my right thigh with it.
DISASTER! It is like an old greek joke where the surgery is immensely succesful but the patient is dead! The breath shortness is there, the opression on my chest is there, the sweating and distress are there! Is this never going to end? In the evening of the next day, the 8th, we are released to go to the hotel and recover. They say the burning pain is from a nerve that got hurt during the operation, that it may take months to go away and I need to be patient. Thay say that we have to wait at least 3 months for the scars of the ablation to heal to see the results and to what percentage the fibrillation goes away. They say the best was done and now we have to wait. They say we have to wait to see how I react to the new medication with time. They say that now that I am out of immediate danger I have to change my life style, to eat well and diet, to exercise gradually more and more. They say many things. A day later Lies drives us to a chalet in a forest that we had booked in order to recover in nature. It is indeed, beautiful there, and although we lose an exit gadget and are stuck for hours, we are visited by many friends, four all the way from Romania, Tavi, Ioanna, Christian and Nicu visit and also Tessa from the UK and Lauren and Alexandra from Spain.
TRIUMPH! Although in pain and distress, the love we receive helps us find gratitude for everything and for all the blessings and all the beautiful people in our lives. We leave on the 15th as programmed after beautiful meetings with beautiful people, a smartwatch that detects atrial fibrilation, gratitude for the help of Willem and Jeanette Suyker in particular and many others. My heart is well 70% of the time, not so well the rest but we are determined to do the best with it.
7. FINALLY BACK HOME TO OUR ITHACA: After a long flight we arrive in Lima safe (of course with more covid tests), sleep in the airport hotel, eat breakfast wrapped in plastic behind plastic barriers and take a doubled masked hellish flight to Tarapoto. Thankfully, it is short. Aura and Emilio wait for us at the airport and soon we are back home, to the paradise of TierraMitica with no masks, no more tests. We hug our family, our cat, our toilet. The adventure is over, a new one begins.
Today, more than a month and a half later we are still triumphing. I have bought an exercise bike and train hard every day, I watch my nutrition and have my diabetes under control, I am well now more than 80% of the time and improving, we are doing cool shit in TierraMitica, Myztik and other projects are on the way, we are in love in paradise and we will get to see many of you guys soon for Xmas, New Year´s, Mythic Party 8, the Lift Off Advanced workshop where we will explore among other things my new work on GOOD and Evil, Right and Wrong and much more, I am losing weight slowly but steadily and are fully ready to enjoy our next DISASTER and treat this impostor as well, exactly just the same.
The real HERO of this Odyssey: My own faithful Penelope, my amazing wife and soulmate Lies Demets Hasson, who carried all our luggage, packed and unpacked a gazillion times, that supported and arranged everything, that kept her smile, love and caring throughout everything, playing multiple roles and juggling everything: My TREASURE!
