The blister from a cold nail

Related stories

• A dog called Chemo

  In brief: A doctor friend in Melbourne has a big Labrador she named 'Chemo'. She was training it to visit hospital wards, because stroking a gentle…

  Read full story▾▴

  there's one of my friends over in Melbourne, now that's Priya Mendes [?] and she’s got this big dog and it was Labrador wasn’t it, and when I saw it, I said “what's its name” and she gave it the name, she's a doctor, she gave it the name “Chemo”. Chemo the dog, that's a really weird name, why do you name it Chemo? She said “because I'm training this dog to be one of these dogs who goes into wards with people who are very, very sick, because we all know that if you take a little dog or a cat or a rabbit into a ward where people are very sick, just being able to pet that dog, to stroke it, have this beautiful soft animal in there, the compassion which a small animal or even a big animal generates amongst human beings has a very strong positive effect on people's recovery. They actually get better. Having a beautiful dog to play with in the ward, it makes you sort of, gets up all your, what's it called, the, not serotonin, all these endomorphines, all this beautiful health things in your body, you all know better than I do... but you know it really works. So that's why she called her dog Chemo because it was short for chemotherapy, that was a little joke, she's a good student of mine, has got a stupid sense of humor just like me. [laughter] So Chemo, Chemo the dog, and of course that dog went into so many wards in its life, healing people, helping people, that dog must have made huge amounts of good karma just by generating compassion in other beings.

  Open story page·Watch this telling

• Meditating through the fever

  In brief: Three or four weeks into an undiagnosed fever (later found to be scrub typhus) in a basic Ubon hospital ward, with no energy and nothing…

  Read full story▾▴

  But I do remember one of the times. And I wish I had been a bit more mindful, but I can understand why I wasn't cuz I had such such incredibly low energy. Never had so much low energy as that time fever of about 3 or 4 weeks. And anyway that uh one day I got sort of depressed but not a depression which was um negative. I don't know that I thought oh this is really awful. Nothing's working. This is terrible. So why don't I do some meditation actually practice know what my teacher would teach me what the Buddha would say do something useful. And this was like three weeks or four weeks into a a very heavy fever and nothing was working, feeling just so exhausted. So I decided to meditate and obviously not cross-legged but just laying on the bed, laying on my back or half on my back, half on this, half on that and being able just to let go of my body. And it was such a wonderful experience just sitting there or not so not sitting. They're laying there with legs all over the place. We've seen people in hospital with a fever. They're not really caring about just how their body is positioned. You're all over the place. But then just going deep inside away from my body, closing my eyes. It was in a a ward of a hospital. So there's lots of noise there, but I couldn't hear anything. No smell. No taste, just going inside to some nice beautiful mind state. Oh, it's just a wonderful time. And I'm really sure that that would be when the fever stopped simply because that's the nature of the mind. It's incredibly powerful and it's so powerful inside. It just stops all this stuff in your body and very happy afterwards.

  Open story page·Watch this telling

• The temporal bell that woke her from coma

  In brief: Angie Marksfield's auntie describes deep coma as blackness; what brought her out was sound — like the tickling of a temple/temporal bell.

  Read full story▾▴

  Angie Marksfield was there and her auntie would tell the story when she was in a coma. She went in a coma. She never told me exactly why she was in that coma but really really deep in a coma and obviously she came out of it. But her story of how she came out the first time was fascinating, like a firsthand description of what it's like and what happens. And she said she was in such a dark dark place, a blackness. And what brought her out was like sound. She thought it was a tickling of a of a uh a temporal bell

  Open story page·Watch this telling

• The heart that remembered the murder

  In brief: Girl ~10–11 gets heart transplant; recurrent nightmare of being attacked and killed. Mother traces donor — murdered prostitute. Dream…

  Read full story▾▴

  there was a few stories of people who had heart transplants and They Carried some sort of memories of the previous owner of the heart there's one amazing story is a young girl had a heart transplant he must be only about 10 or 11 years of old and after the operation very good success when she was sent home afterwards so she started having nightmares recovered nightmares the same scene in The Nightmare all the time so she told her mommy her dream was that she was attacked in a dark Street and killed and murdered and it was so recurrent that her mother sort of went to the doctor and said there's something weird going on here my child has got the same dream night after night and she wakes up screaming and of course the doctor said oh it's just the trauma of the operation you know it's a very heavy operation it might have done something to the play but she'll get over it just forget about it take another Panadol or something I shouldn't say things like that I get trouble with the doctors in this audience but usually say if it doesn't go away within two weeks come back again we do some more tests but I'll being cheeky but I get away with that but anyway it didn't go away so she took it further so it kept on recurring again so that she she had some contacts in the hospital so she did a little bit of U uh suppose it's illegal improper searching to find out where this heart came from and she found out that the heart had actually come from a prostitute who had been killed and murdered and when she heard that she went to the police station and told all the whole story this is a dream of my daughter I just found out the heart came from a murdered person does her memory in dream match any of the situation only the circumstances of the murder and the police people they investigated the situation where the original owner of the heart was killed it matched and the information they got from this girl after you know she had a heart transplant the information she got from her dreams was enough for the police to identify a suspect question him and he confessed they caught him very weird and strange thing there was enough memories left in that heart to actually to find the killer of the old heart

  Open story page·Watch this telling