When a home becomes a place of wellness

ONE never knows what impact a home has on its visitors.

We all apply layers and layers of love into the design, decoration and emotional feel of our homes.

My god-daughter, Charlene, recently discovered that she had cancer in her back which had migrated to other parts of her body.

Being young with small children, she and her family decided she should try radiation and chemotherapy.

She had wonderful support from her friends on Facebook.

This sort of unconditional friendship and support in times of hardship is the collateral beauty I was speaking about last week.

Despite this love and support, the cancer was taking its toll on her body and was causing a lot of anguish to those closest to her.

Partly out of a selfish motive to see her again and partly because we wanted to spoil her, we asked her to bring her family to visit us.

They have just spent five days with us. We had to be careful of infection, as her platelet count was so low as a result of the treatment she was having.

But she was strong and she went for walks around the garden, swam in Mermaid’s pool and did a little pottery with Meshack and the children.

We shared wholesome meals that we had cooked together and reminisced about how our friendship with her parents had developed. It was a fun time.

I don’t know whether it was the change in environment, the food, the company or just a good phase in the illness, but Charlene has colour in her cheeks, is eating well and has energy to enjoy her very active children.

Best of all, her blood count has improved from .6 to 4.2. We don’t know what to attribute this to. I imagine that it was a combination of factors and we all take credit for it.

They decided to drive up from Cape Town to take us up on our invitation and we all committed to making the weekend the best it could be.

The moral of this story is: don’t procrastinate when you want to do something good – you never know whether you will have another opportunity.