Leaving the house this morning was like running late for a train when you don’t know how long you’ll be away. I packed my over-the-shoulder travel bag—a cross between a duffle and a purse, the kind that can hold everything you may need when you don’t know what the day will hold. Today I’ll get the results of my latest CT scan.
Waiting to get my blood drawn at Yale-New Haven Hospital, I fumble around in my bag for a pen and my “Decomposition” brand notebook of grid-ruled paper. The same compartment holds an issue of The Newtowner I tossed in for a magical realist story on whales I want to read again. There’s some change and a Charlie card left over from the trip to Boston in a mesh pouch where I used to keep a St. Peregrine medal — until I gave it to my boyfriend at the time. His mother S. was going into hospice; the tumor in her pancreas had invaded her ovaries. It was on that trip to Boston that I discovered there’s a patron saint of cancer patients. Wandering around the Prudential Center, a whirl of kiosks and eateries, I stumbled into a Catholic chapel. I lit a candle and prayed, for my grandmother unhinged with dementia, for Sudan on the verge of civil war again. On the way out, I stopped by the gift shop where I browsed through the precious-medal pendants of saints. There were the usual holy suspects: Mary, St. Jude, Thérèse of Lisieux — and one I didn’t recognize. A man called Peregrine, “the Wonder-worker,” said the prayer card attached to the medal. He endured his own suffering—incurable cancer—with patience and fortitude. He prayed fervently for healing and received it instantly one night. He continued his life of holiness, interceding with all the more zeal for those afflicted with life-threatening illnesses. I bought a St. Peregrine medal to help me pray for S. She’d been in complete remission—scans showed her body to be cancer-free—for three years after chemo. But the tumors were raring again, spreading with a fury. When I got back to the Y where I was staying in Back Bay, I googled St. Peregrine. Afflicted with a cancerous growth below his knee, he was waiting to have his leg amputated. The night before the surgery, while he was praying for healing, he received a vision—Christ coming down from the cross to touch his wound. Peregrine was healed completely. I found a prayer to St. Peregrine for sick friends and relatives. “Oh, Great St. Peregrine,” I read aloud. “For so many years you bore in your own flesh this cancerous disease that destroys the very fiber of our being, and [you] had recourse to the source of all grace when the power of man could do no more.” S.’s cancer was resisting the treatment regimen recommended by some of the best oncologists in the country. “Ask of God and Our Lady the cure of these sick persons whom we entrust to you.” I prayed, half believing in a miracle for S. I prayed, not knowing that I, too, have incurable cancer — not knowing that a mass was forming in my esophagus; malignant cells were multiplying fast and moving through my lymphatic system, saturating my liver with metastases.
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