I Prayed for A Miracle Two Decades Ago and Got One and I am Praying for Another One Today
The last time I prayed the rosary so intensely was the second time that cancer appeared in my chest, in July of 2003...
I am going to SPEAK NOW of how praying to the Virgin Mary Helped Me Through HELL, a time when I felt there was nothing else that would get me through.
It was early July of 2003 when that bastard at Sloan Kettering told me I absolutely had to have a stem cell transplant if I wanted to live. A stem cell transplant basically scours out your immune system and effectively brings you to the brink of death before it hopefully restores you to health. You do it if it’s the only way to survive.
In response to the doctor, my body and mind rose up in a kind of fury and I shook my head, full of brand new hair. There were long curls everywhere and I challenged him for the first time after a year of excruciating treatment,
“No I’m fine. I do not need anything of the kind.” But that bastard who in the intervening years has become a woman, Alison J instead of Alan J, insisted in his cocky fashion that there was no alternative. My husband and I had the good sense to resist. We demanded a second opinion.
“Why do you need one? I’m the best in the world,“ or some such crap came from Alan‘s mouth but after a fashion, as it happened, he finally gave in, telling us, “Well, I guess you could see George Canellos at Dana-Farber in Boston.” George Canellos, as it turns out,
is considered “the grandfather of Hodgkin’s disease.“
The period of time between seeing that pompous asshole and the amazing Dr. Canellos couldn’t have been more than a few weeks, but in terms of the agony of waiting (because I had had very intensive “experimental” chemo the summer before) couldn’t possibly have been more nerve-racking. Thinking back today, a day on which everything in the world seems to hinge, I would say it was a maximum of five weeks.
It was during that time that I started saying my own brand of Hail Mary, a bow to my deep feminism. The fact that I am a practicing Jew has nothing to do with it. My prayers are as much political statements as religious/spiritual ones. Saying Hail Marys, I reinforce my feminist leanings. I do not say the name Jesus. Nor, when I’m praying the rosary, do I say any of the Our Fathers. My prayers to the Divine Feminine are of the OUR MOTHER variety.
When I say I prayed around the clock in July of 2003, I mean it. Whenever I would surface during the night, which — with my excruciating anxiety — was often, the words of the Hail Mary were on my lips: “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us now and forever, Amen.” That’s what I said over and over and over again until I was weary of it. But still, I kept up saying it
At some point during that period, I began to have a very simple vision.
It was a window of light. Many pains. Excuse me, panes. Light framed in little boxes within a big box. It caught my internal eye so deeply as I prayed and as I meditated, and as I waited and waited to see what my medical destiny would be, I prayed and gazed at that window.
On July 30, 2003, or thereabouts, my husband, Richard, my sister Karen, and my older daughter Jocelyn, who was only 18 years old at the time, and I drove to Dana-Farber. I prayed the whole way there. I also chanted. I had started doing vocalizations for each of the seven chakras earlier that year at the suggestion of a very, very talented energy worker, a woman named Denise. I chanted (and I still do the chanting, vocalizing the chakras every day, as I meditate) “AHHHHHHHH” for the chest, where a year before, a tumor the size of a large cantaloupe lay. It was gone now, but the question was, did I have to go the way of the MONSTER at Sloan?
We were in the waiting room at Dana, and I kept seeing the panes of light. And the rest of it?
The rest is like a dream or better yet, a movie where the heroine prevails against seeming impossible odds at the end
Within minutes of meeting Dr. Canellos, a man with the kindest face imaginable, one that instantly tells you he is a deeply compassionate human being, I heard words I had never in my life dreamed I would hear.
“I told him that if he was going to use that experimental treatment for Hodgkins, he had better do a very thorough job of radiating properly.”
What? WHAT? What was he telling me exactly?
“Of course, Claudia, I have to look at the films, but I’m pretty certain that the one spot of cancer you have near your diaphragm is a leftover, where they missed radiating you.”
“You mean, Doctor, in other words I don’t need… a stem cell transplant? “
He said he was pretty certain of it. We talked a bit further — actually, Dr. Canellos spent 45 minutes with us that day, more time than I had spent collectively with MONSTER the whole previous year.
Dr. Canellos said something else to me that day, and even after two decades, it totally blows my mind and still makes me so furious that I can’t speak.
He told me that the doctor at Sloan Kettering had a specific research protocol in which he was looking for patients who had failed the Stanford five experimental treatment that he had used on me, and so, would then need a stem cell transplant.
In other words, I was being cherrypicked for that bastard’s study. I had heard about things like this happening before, but never in my life did I think I would end up as the guinea pig.
“Claudia, I’m telling you that Dr. M is the hammer and you my dear, you are his nail!”
To this day, I can’t begin to contain in words, my intense joy and relief and also, my overwhelming fury — at what Dr. Canellos had just revealed to me. And it was then, just then, that I looked down at the floor. I was speechless. There beneath the overhead skylight in the examining room lay a window of light, many panes, many panes.
Many many pains.
I cannot explain this miracle, this mystery, but I have been meditating on it this week and praying the rosary again for the first time since.
I am praying for our Democracy, praying for decency, praying for common sense. And common humanity. I am praying as a feminist. I am praying that feminine energy prevails. And today, when I worry, I close my eyes and I envision women coming out of their houses in droves, women coming from apartments, from big houses and from little houses, from tents, from everywhere possible and I see them voting and voting and voting and voting and voting and voting and voting and voting and voting…
and I pray that Light will prevail
!
I love the image of all the women coming out of their houses and voting.