Something had to change. The quality of my physical health was moving in the wrong direction. It was now nine months after my return home from the medical ordeal that began when on vacation in Kauai.

With tears welling up from the core of my being, washing down my face like warm summer rain, there I sat glued to my computer monitor for more than two hours, captivated as person after person witnessed how their lives had been forever touched by a Phenomenal Woman: the late Dr. Maya Angelou.

‘When we come home to our body, we come home to our soul.’ ~Mary C. Earle My husband and I were gone for one month for what was to have been a two week vacation in Kauai. While away, I was hospitalized in ICU (first in Kauai, then in Honolulu); threatened with lung surgery; signed end-of-life papers; almost died twice; had a gangrene appendix surgically removed; diagnosed with peritonitis; and turned sixty . Upon returning home, I naively presumed that this mysterious journey had run its course. I did not fathom that the recovery process...

When my husband and I got on the plane to go to Kauai, it was to spend two glorious weeks sitting on the beach in Hanalei Bay while feeling the island breezes on our skin, playing in the warm water, and taking in the beauty of the sunsets. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that, instead, I would be hooked up to machines, lying in a hospital bed inside the stark, sterile walls of the ICU unit at Kauai’s Wilcox Hospital.