Angela says she had reached the end of her rope when she found a pamphlet from the Seelos Center in nearby New Orleans. The pamphlet offered a Redemptorist priest from the Center to visit anyone hospitalized and pray over them for a cure through Father Seelos’ intercession.
Little John wasn’t hospitalized but his distraught mother, she can now kid, felt she might soon be. Two days after his second birthday, on Friday, March 4, she carried the miserable child to the Seelos Center. To her dismay, she found the lone priest (not the gracious man there now) little inclined to pray for the baby; if he extended his offer to the non-hospitalized, he explained, he feared he would be overwhelmed. Angela begged and pleaded that he just bless the child with Father Seelos’ crucifix in God’s name.
“You’re looking for a miracle,” the priest accused as if this were an offense.
“I’m asking God,” corrected the determined mother, “for a doctor who will find out what’s wrong with my child so they’ll cure what he has or keep it under control.”
Only after half an hour’s wrangling and Angela’s firm promise not to run out and tell other people her non-hospitalized child had been prayed for at the Center did the priest reluctantly bless the scabby-skinned two-year-old.
The next Tuesday, March 8, a nurse working for the specialist who had been ineffectually treating John suddenly took advantage of her boss’s absence to recommend that Angela consult another doctor, who, in turn, immediately sent the little patient to dermatologist James Burke.
Dr. Burke sandwiched the toddler into his day’s schedule, To Angela’s joy and relief, as soon as he looked at him, he said offhandedly, “Oh, we can get that under control.” He ordered John off all soap and a number of foods such as the milk formula, orange juice, egg, and chocolate. For temporary relief he gave a shot. Although allergy specialists would not expect food-triggered eczema to clear up until some days after the last offending item was eaten, that night when Angela bathed John with the recommended over-the-counter soap substitute, the eczemic scales simply floated away with the bathwater.
Put to bed without any restraints in his pajama sleeves, the toddler slept peaceably-as did his grateful parents and siblings.
From then on, he neither scratched nor bled. In 1987, for twenty-three-year-old John his childhood eczema is only a story.
Five months later, in the first days of August 1966, unpleasant symptoms of her own sent Angela to nearby New Orleans’ Sellers and Sanders Clinic. There Dr. Alfred J. Rufty took her history, palpated her abdomen swollen to-proportions of a six-month pregnancy, and found a liver nine times normal size. Angela had excellent rapport with her doctor and can say, “I trusted him to the fullest,” but when he tentatively diagnosed, “My guess is you have cirrhosis of the liver,” Angela recalls:
“I sat up and said indignantly, ‘Doctor, I don’t even drink.’” The amused doctor countered that there are all kinds of cirrhosis, some quite unrelated to alcohol.
But the truth was to prove worse. A precautionary biopsy under local anesthesia retrieved no liver tissue at all-only malignant cells. A follow-up brought liver tissue but saturated with cancer.
Exploratory surgery was scheduled immediately for August 8 at Southern Baptist Hospital.
“How long will the operation be,” Angela asked. Because Rufty respected her wish “to know everything,” he told her frankly, “It’ll be one hour if there’s no hope; if it’s five hours long (because removal of the cancer appears possible), you’ll be flat on your back for at least a year.”
“Well, when I come out I’m going to ask what time it is. Then I’ll know exactly how I stand,” Angela said with characteristic resoluteness.
Both Dr. Rufty and Dr. Freeman, the surgeon, were non-Catholics but the latter, a genial six-foot-six-inch Methodist, was willing to wear a memento of Father Seelos, as a symbol of prayer for his intercession, on his surgeon’s cap while operating (Angela was allowed nothing on herself). Asking that intercession, the young mother of four put herself in God’s hands.
The operation took one hour.