Can a crisis of the flesh—say, the diagnosis of a disease such as cancer—summon barely suspected healing powers into existence?
A few years ago, something changed my life. It was a violent change—a diagnosis of cancer. Yet when my doctor sat me down on the edge of his padded table, I had felt not fear but a kind of weird exhilaration—like the moment the rollercoaster crests its first hump and you slowly begin the gravity-abducted swoosh to earth.
Something would now require me to draw on every resource I possessed, on whatever I thought I knew about myself and life in general. As my doctor strove for the right balance between dolor and reassurance, up within me sprang a fugitive hope; a hope familiar to all who find themselves in such circumstances, and which made the drone of his recitative fade momentarily like an FM station in a car leaving town: Who knows? I thought to myself: Maybe there'll be a miracle.
At the time, I was the editor of New Age Journal. I had often heard stories around the office of patients who got well after the doctor did everything but pronounce them dead. But such tales have the ring of wistful folklore when your own life seemingly hangs in the balance. I eventually had the doctor's surgery, and was pronounced cured.
Still, I was amazed at how sickness had affected me; how it had seemed to plunge me into a separate reality that, despite years of self-analysis, was as unfamiliar as the dark side of the moon. I had sensed the stirring of great forces I could scarcely begin to fathom. I had felt at once mortally imperiled and embarked on a great adventure; cheated of my life yet restored to some deeper selfhood. My dreams had been infused with a crystalline, terrible immediacy; emotions had swept through me in torrents. The voice of the psyche had never been so stentorian, nor so incomprehensible.
I wondered afterward: Had the luminosity I had seen in the throes of illness just been the delirium of the shipwrecked? Or was there some way that disease may summon barely suspected healing powers into existence?
Under a compulsion to sort out my own strange experiences, I spent years interviewing dozens of people who claimed to have had unusual healings. This was no academic pursuit, but a survival exercise; a way to ride out the aftershocks of a catastrophe still rumbling through my life. I was oddly gratified to discover that many of those I spoke to had also undergone inward shiftings of tectonic magnitude. Their crisis of the flesh had become, as had mine, a dilemma of the spirit.
A few people I met seemed to have had a spontaneous remission of an incurable condition, such a rara avis of an event that its every sighting is doubted. They ply the circuit, these grateful, sometimes baffled beneficiaries of healing: the man trimmed out in polyester making televised couch-chat out of his vanished polyps; a woman telling Joan Rivers how the tumor-the-size-of-an-orange that once straddled her left ovary just... disappeared. "Incredible," Rivers brays. "You hear these stories, you just go... unbelievable!"
As well you might, if you retain a phosphor of native skepticism. But if you also possess a scintilla of innate curiosity, you cannot help but wonder, Could it be? Do miracles really happen? It is only lately that you might hear science reply, with quiet, uncomprehending vehemence, Believe it.
The evidence, as it turns out, has been there all along, literally hidden between the lines. An eye-opening encyclopedic compilation by California's Institute of Noetic Sciences lists hundreds of case reports unearthed from worldwide medical journals, where they had lain moldering like so many Dead Sea Scrolls.
A typical account, culled from the journal Cancer, describes a 51-year-old patient with a "fist-sized" abdominal tumor with metastases to the liver—a fast-progressing, invariably fatal condition. The man's stomach was operated on, but when his surgeons saw the spread of cancer's malign domain, they could only close him up and send him home to die. Inconveniently, 12 years later the left-for-dead man appeared in the emergency room of a Boston-area veterans hospital and presented himself to Dr. Steven Rosenberg.
Rosenberg was a bona fide Doogie Houser: college at 16, an M.D. and Ph.D by his early twenties. This case, one of his very first as a junior surgical resident, looked routine enough if a little depressing. The man, named Mr. DeAngelo, whose symptoms led Rosenberg to correctly surmise he was now suffering an infected gall bladder, was a grizzled old vet down on his luck.
Yet Mr. DeAngelo, with what Rosenberg would later remember as "an aura of secret triumph," regaled him with an outlandish story the young doctor was sure came from the befuddlements of age and alcohol. Mr. DeAngelo insisted he had had terminal cancer and it had just... gone away. Digging out the man's original pathology report, a skeptical Rosenberg was nonplussed to discover it was true—the man before him with the graying stubble and self-congratulatory mien was a species of medical freak, consigned to the grave and yet risen.
Rosenberg performed the gall-bladder operation, taking time to probe the man's liver for the cancer he was sure was still there, if perhaps inexplicably slowed in its usual growth. There was nothing.
Tags:
abducted,
behavior,
crests,
dark side of the moon,
delirium,
dolor,
drone,
exhilaration,
great adventure,
healing,
healing powers,
illness,
immediacy,
luminosity,
miracle,
psyche,
reassurance,
recitative,
self analysis,
separate reality,
spirituality,
swoosh,
throes,
torrents,
violent change
