Do you believe in an extraneous superpower (including that of God’s, one’s own subconscious mind, sixth sense, intuition, or soul/spirit of a deceased family member – to name a few sources of invisible superpower)? I do. You may as well after reading the following personal account.

My wife, Kam, suffered attacks of seizures at the dawn of August 26, 2018. The paramedics rushed her to Montfort Hospital. During the treatment including her blood tests and MRIs, doctors there found that Kam had a brain tumour which, in turn, was causing the seizures. They recommended that we consult a particular brain surgeon at the Civic Hospital. They even got us the earliest appointment with that surgeon. We met this surgeon on September 5.

At 5.20 a.m. on September 18, I drove Kam to Ottawa’s Civic Hospital as she was scheduled to undergo an awake-brain surgery (or craniotomy) to be performed by the brain surgeon we had consulted between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. If the surgery had gone well, Kam would have returned home the next day and lived the remainder of her life, not necessarily cancer-free, at home.

Alas! The surgery didn’t go as well as planned and as a result, left Kam partially paralyzed. She had lost the muscle power in her right hand and leg, memory, and ability to speak. The surgeon didn’t want to send Kam home in this condition and made a recommendation to keep her in the hospital.

Kam was treated for her grade IV, glioblastoma brain tumour, in Ottawa hospitals, namely, the Civic, General (for radiation and chemotherapy), Rehabilitation Centre (to improve her lost muscle power and speech), and St. Vincent (post-treatment care/maintenance hospital), between September 18, 2018 (the day she left home to have a craniotomy at Civic) and February 11, 2019 (the day she bid adieu to her loved ones just before the midnight hour at St. Vincent).

While visiting my wife each day in the hospital, I kept a daily logbook documenting her treatment, the quality of care provided by the doctors, nurses, and orderlies, and her steadily sliding personal health due to the progressive nature of her cancerous brain tumour.

My intention was to turn this logbook into a book delineating how hard, sad, and painful it was for me to see my soulmate of over four decades slowly slip away from me to find eternal peace and a pain-free shelter under God’s umbrella. I sincerely wanted to dedicate this book to Kam’s loving memory and her undeterred devotion and love for the family. I also wanted to dwell upon the quality of care provided by the medical personnel in our public hospitals, and on her patiently and bravely fought battle with cancer that she eventually lost.

There were a few other reasons too I wanted to write this book:

First, use it as a self-therapy by writing down and sharing my sad and painful emotions and grief with my loved ones, friends, and readers my feelings, thoughts, and daily fright of losing my wife.

Second, to appraise the loved ones of the future victims of glioblastoma the early symptoms of this cancerous brain tumour, the pros and cons of current treatments available to treat it, and above all, how its steady progress weakens a victim’s physical mobility, muscle power, speech, memory, comprehension, and ability to recognize people (culminating in a state of dementia) – all making the victim totally bedridden and suffer intolerable pains at the last stretch of suffering, and eventually die.

Third, all proceeds from the sale of this book were to be donated to the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada to continue its research on treating and curing a cancerous brain tumour.

Well, a man proposes, and God disposes.

Despite the declining state of my health due to the overwhelming grief and stress caused by my wife’s untimely death, I started to write this book as intended. I had completed 100 pages. Then one day, I lost the document by inadvertently pressing a key on the keyboard that likely deleted the document.

That was quite a setback. I cursed and swore myself on my stupidity, first, for not having made a copy of it, and second, for erasing it all the way. It took me a while to recover from this setback. My resilience and inner strength rekindled my energy and desire to start writing the book again.

It took me more than a year to finish the book. It contained eleven chapters, spread over 287 pages or 159,000 words. I was contented to see the completed first draft of the book along with the write-up of its blurb and the back cover.

The standard next stage was to edit this draft version before sending it to a professional editor to edit it prior to its printing. Also, I arranged its formatting for both electronic and print versions, using a 6″ x 9″ size.

I had been coming along well with the editing of the book. On July 10, 2023, I was on page 200. I saved the document and went upstairs to the kitchen to have a soft drink with some nuts. I was just taking a short break. When I came down, the screen was still showing the text where I had left. I still had some nuts in my right hand while I half-sat in my chair.

I had put the nuts on a napkin and placed it closer to the keyboard. Then by half-sitting in the chair, I pulled it closer to the desk. While I was moving my fingers closer to the keyboard, one of my fingers must have accidentally touched a key that, in turn, showed me a blank page on the screen. I thought perhaps the page (#200) that I had left on the screen had just blanked out. So, I re-entered the filename to bring back the document (that I had saved before going upstairs) on the screen and again found a blank page on the screen. I moved the side arrow down and noticed nothing but that blank page. Evidently, the whole book (close to 200 edited and 87 unedited pages) had been erased.

I just froze in my chair and kept looking at the blank page with consternation. The sight of the blank page caused me severe heartache and mental anguish. All my work done over the last couple of years had been washed out. I silently cursed myself for my folly. The book was lost and there was no backup (as it’s hard to create a backup each day when one is editing a document, anywhere between one to five pages a day). It reminded me of the day I had lost 100 pages of the first version of the book in exactly similar conditions.

However, all was not lost yet. I had a sliver of hope to retrieve my book. I read that an erased Word document can be retrieved in several ways. Unfortunately, I personally didn’t know how to use any one of these ways. I desperately needed the help of a computer expert to do it for me right away.

So, I called our older daughter, who lives close by and has good computer skills. I requested her to come over and try to retrieve the document. It was nice of her that she came over and tried to recover the document. She couldn’t.

Then I called the Geek Squad at Best Buy, located near our house, and sought their help in retrieving the lost document. The technician there wanted me to bring the PC to their shop. I called my helper from the neighbourhood, a boy who lives a few doors away from my house and has been dedicatedly helping me ever since my ailing confinement in a house with limited mobility. I requested him to come over and help me take the PC to Best Buy. After a couple of days, the Geek Squad called me to pick up the PC; the technician there couldn’t retrieve the file either.

As a last resort, I called my younger brother, who lives in Oakville, Ont., and sought his help to retrieve the document. He is a computer expert and keeps himself abreast of computer technology. I sent him the file by courier service as I was too eager to have the document back. After a few days, my brother informed me that he couldn’t find the document as it had been fully erased. That really broke my heart.

It was the second time I had lost the same document (i.e., the book on my wife’s illness). I have been writing all my life and have never lost a document like this. I had not encountered such a problem in publishing any of my previous books. It keeps haunting me as to why I have lost this document twice now.

Maybe some superpower, like the soul/spirit of my deceased wife, doesn’t want me to publish this book dwelling on her sickness. Or, put another way, her invisible soul/spirit, which is still and always will be present in the house and watches me over my shoulders, ensures that I don’t unravel anything about the pain and suffering she experienced during her terminal illness or write about her courage, patience, and bravery she showed in coping with brain cancer between August 2018 and February 2019.

Since my wife was a very private person, she had even entrusted me with the task of ensuring that no one ever visited her while she was in the hospital (nonetheless, I wish to thank those who visited her unannounced). She didn’t want to talk to anyone about her terminal sickness. The publication of this book must have contravened her personal wishes and hurt her soul.

The loss of the document has been very hard on me. Nonetheless, I have accepted the loss and found solace in the adage: “Everything happens for the best.” What that is, God only knows.

To me, the good thing about this accidental loss, enforced by a superpower in the name of my late wife’s soul/spirit, is that I have preserved my deceased wife’s personal wish, and that is, to keep day-to-day details of her sickness strictly private. The invisible power of her soul/spirit eventually wins, i.e., to keep her privacy intact, and make my intentions lick the dust.

Key Words:  Spousal death   Soul/spirit   Superpower   Brain tumour   Craniotomy