"I rushed out of the operating room," Rosenberg was later to write in his book, The Transformed Cell, "still dressed in green, still encrusted in drying blood. This didn't seem possible. There had been only four documented cases—not four a year in the United States, but four ever, in the world—of spontaneous and complete remission of stomach cancer." Mr. DeAngelo, he immediately realized, "presented a mystery of ultimately enormous dimensions. Something began to burn in me, something that has never gone out."
From that moment on, Rosenberg dedicated himself to a quest to uncover the body's secret cancer-fighting mechanisms. By the relatively tender age of 34, he was made chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute. Three years ago, he devised a highly experimental cancer treatment for advanced cancer using cells engineered to produce tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a potent enzyme capable of rapidly dissolving bulging tumors in test animals, and which might have been a factor in Mr. DeAngelo's astounding medical hat trick.
A Glimmering Pearl
But the question of what had made Mr. DeAngelo different from other patients—of who he really was—is never answered, or even asked. Rosenberg's 1972 case report is maddeningly incurious. "No evidence of tumor or other masses could be found in the abdomen," he states simply. "No adenopathy could be palpated." Sieving through the medical annals of miracle, one is confronted with articles dry to the point of desiccation. If their subjects had psyches, relationships, or meaningful lives, the authors seem to be saying, these were of no more consequence than an oyster shell that accidentally produces within its dull gray housing an impossibly rare, glimmering pearl.
This has been an enduring frustration to investigators intrigued by the notion that there might be psychosocial factors conducive to spontaneous remission. However, as I and others have discovered, sometimes the simplest line of inquiry—Would you mind telling me your story?—leads beyond the mechanics of the human immune system toward the mysteries of the human soul; toward what one is tempted to call, for want of a better term, a psychology of the miraculous.
One such case is that of Mitchell May. When he was 21, May's destiny took a horrifying wrong turn. On his way to a bluegrass festival on a rain-slicked Alabama road, a car struck him head-on, reducing his van to a twisted wreck, collapsing his lung, and shattering his leg in 40 places. He was flown to UCLA in a full body cast, where a team of several dozen orthopedic, vascular, and plastic surgeons declared his leg unsalvageable.
"From just below the knee down to the ankle:" remembers orthopedist Edgar Dawson, M.D., "there was just bare bone hanging out with no muscle or skin over it. The leg was grossly infected. It had to come off." But May stubbornly refused amputation, even when his brother, who said his leg "looked like a pride of lions had chewed on it until they had enough;" was about to sign a court order allowing doctors to remove the dying appendage.
Desperate at the impasse, May's mother sought out a healer whose unorthodox methods included laying-on of hands, hypnosis, and prayer. Jack Gray was not the classic image of a healer, unless one's imagination ran to old-timers with impasto-thick New York accents in cheesy leisure suits. But Mitchell says this apparition, who drove a wheezing Pinto in from the Valley to stay by his side 12 hours a day, was seemingly able to bypass medical science completely.
"His hands would dance around me," recalls May. "He somehow managed to take me into very deep trance states, just using his voice." Within three days Mitchell's constant pain—the excruciating sensation of raw nerves exposed to air that had resisted the most powerful and addictive painkillers—was gone.
Over a period of months, with Jack "lending his energy," the two-inch gap in May's bone began to regenerate, the missing nerve and muscle tissue filled in, and his never-set fractures began to fuse. After years, against all medical expectation, he regained full use of his leg. Dr. Dawson, when asked to explain it all, says, "That's easy. It was a miracle."
But May, now a cheerful 42-year-old, claims his miracle was one of the human psyche. "Being literally dismembered somehow opened up a new world. It was as if by being taken apart, other energies could enter through the broken places. I was forced to discover the life of the soul, and I think that was most responsible for my healing."
May's description is reminiscent of the healing path described by shamans the world over: the plummet into helplessness and mortality, the awakening of a dormant treasure-source of power, and a phoenix-like ascent to wholeness. Writes anthropologist Joan Halifax about the "initiatory crisis" of the wounded healer: "The neophyte turns away from the secular life, either voluntarily, ritually, or spontaneously through sickness, and turns inward toward the unknown, the mysterium. This change of direction can be accomplished only through what Carl Jung has referred to as 'an obedience to awareness.' "
Nearly all the people I interviewed discovered their own version of this path—a journey that seemed most often to involve a sudden intensification of the inner life, replete with vivid dreams, psychological epiphanies, sometimes near-hallucinatory episodes and perceptual alterations.
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