Dr. Freeman found the liver simply “replaced” by a malignant tumor (90 percent tumor, 10 percent liver, Angela would be told). Its dimensions nine times normal, the organ “contained multiple nodules of tumor,” reported Freeman, “in both lobes.” To have cut all the diseased organ away would have been to leave the patient liverless. Freeman could only sew her up. His report ends, “Prognosis: poor.”
To verify his findings, the Southern Baptist Hospital pathologist, Dr. Frankie M. Slay, sent tissue samples taken during the operation to other pathologists for biopsy, including Dr. Will Steinberg at Tulane and doctors at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington, D.C. All agreed the liver’s invader was malignant.
Furthermore, because only children usually have liver cancer by itself, the pathologists agreed it would be very surprising if there was not another, primary (that is, parent) tumor in Angela’s body of which the liver cancer was merely a deadly offspring.
Experiments have shown that a doctor shaking his head worriedly over a patient can lower that individual’s resistance significantly as measured by white cells. Now Dr. Rufty, whom Angela trusted so, told her that she would most likely be dead of total liver failure within two weeks. In fact she would probably never leave the hospital.
“I’m a very positive thinker,” Angela has said.
Instead of turning to planning her funeral, Angela’s mind went to Father Seelos’ prayers and how they had obtained just what she sought for John.
She looked the doctor in the eye.
“What will you do for treatment?” she asked.
“Fifteen pathologists from throughout the United States will study the malignancy and recommend what type of chemotherapy we might try as a treatment if,” — his voice underlined the word — “you’re still alive in two weeks.”
Not only alive, but with her liver improving rather than failing, Angela was home by her August 26 birthday. On her way, she had stopped at Fr. Seelos’ grave, in St. Mary’s. There, although she had been told she could not kneel, kneel she did to give thanks.
Meanwhile the consulting pathologists, probably figuring that the object of their deliberations wouldn’t be alive long enough to profit by them, took their time. It was well over a month after exploratory surgery revealed her terminal condition, before the hospital called to say the recommendation had been received.
Proposed was a purely experimental treatment for the liver tumor (to the physicians’ chagrin, in spite of every possible exploration — was this the first part of a miracle? — no other cancer site could be found).
Beginning that fall, a derivative of the deadly World War I chemical warfare poison mustard gas, called Thiotepa, was given Angela once a week through intravenous glucose solution. She was counseled soberly that she must prepare herself for severe side effects including terrible nausea, the loss of her hair, possible loss of teeth from loosening, bleeding gums, and others. She would, Dr. Rufty told her again, be flat on her back for a whole year suffering greatly and unable to do anything.
And there was, with all of this, little hope that the experimental treatment would do anything but add to her miseries.
To say Angela surprised her physicians is putting it mildly.
She had absolutely no side effects to the derivative of the gas that decimated both German and Allied troops. Further, once recovered from the surgery, she was up and doing. That Thanksgiving — four months after being given two weeks to live — with help she was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her family of six and guests. Christmas, she had out-of-town guests who stayed on into January so she could show them all the sights of nearby New Orleans.
Literally she has never looked back, except to tell her story to interested people for the glory of God and to honor the prayer power of Francis Xavier Seelos.
Five years later, in October 1971, Angela elected to have surgery for gallstones, predicting that something extraordinary would be found when her liver was once more exposed to a surgeon s view.
It was: Dr. David Weilbaecher’s report says he found only tiny scars on the liver surface while the liver itself appeared normally tumorless. Both a needle biopsy and a wedge biopsy were again done. Like a liver scan done at the same time, they showed only a normal liver.
A follow-up report sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology received the non-committal comment, “the apparent cure following treatment with Thiotepa is remarkable.”
Was the chemotherapy the cause of cure? The men who can best judge that, Angela Boudreaux’s physicians, don’t think so. For one thing, she had already lived on in an inexplicable way before chemotherapy ever commenced. Then, according to Dr. Rufty, her liver shrank and returned to normal too rapidly for the chemotherapy to have been the agent of change. The Protestant presented her case to a group of medical colleagues and said, “This case is definitely a miracle.” He and other non-Catholic doctors cooperated fully, as did Catholic David Welbaecher, in submitting her medical history, to Rome in favor of Father Seelos’ Cause.
In June 1986, Dr. Rufty, presently working in the field of cardiology as associate professor at Wake Forest University’s Bowman Cray School of Medicine, in a letter to Angela said he had discussed her case at length with Dr. Weilbaecher at a Louisiana State University medical school reunion. Noting that both doctors had testified before the ecclesiastical board of inquiry, he added they agreed that “yours was the most amazing case we’ve ever been associated with.”
Even Jesus found that only a small percentage of those he healed returned to give thanks. In the case of Angela Boudreaux, her gratitude to God for the cure and thanksgiving to Father Seelos for his prayers led her to become a tireless worker toward the Church’s official recognition of the Redemptorist priest’s sanctity.
Perhaps this wholehearted gratitude opened her to receive continued blessings from God through his saint. Then again, in life Father Seelos was a genial, compassionate man who never lost interest in those he once helped-whether they were as grateful as Angela Boudreaux or not. At any rate, in 1975 the Louisiana family feels they once again had proof of the power of Father Seelos’ intercession.
That year, twenty-year-old Angela Marie, the oldest of the family’s four children, was attending the University of New Orleans. Like many students who get very good grades, she was highly stressed. Besides working her way through school playing the organ for weddings and holding down a part-time job, Angela Marie was re-adjusting to American life after a year as a scholarship student in France.
During periods of stress, such as exam times, she had always tended to have a skin allergy that looked something like ringworm.
That allergy was acting up now, and her mom counseled her to go to the family’s dermatologist, Nia Terezakis, a Catholic woman physician from India.
The same evening, Dr. Terezakis phoned Angela Marie’s mother.
“Mrs. Boudreaux,” the physician confided, “I’m worried. Not about the rash. But about the itty-bitty shiny black mole — a little flat thing the size of a straight pin head. I found it on your daughter’s back. I cut it out deep — eleven stitches’ worth-and it’s being biopsied.”
Neither doctor nor her family wanted to frighten Angela Marie. But they all prayed, asking the intercession of Father Seelos, that the dermatologist’s worst fears not be realized.
At first it seemed they were. Biopsy showed a malignant melanoma, the most deadly type of skin or mole cancer. Without lumps, any sensation or pain, it quietly kills, not by the pin-size head but through the strangling, fast-growing feelers, or “roots.”
Dr. Terezakis dug with her scalpel again. This time, after forty-three stitches were required to close her extensive chase after those roots, she could report that she had removed them successfully, along with the pecan-sized malignancy below the surface of the skin. The deadly feelers had almost but not quite — the difference between life and death — penetrated the young woman’s lungs.
With every mole on her body removed and strict instructions to avoid the sun, Angela Marie was no worse for wear from a close brush with death.
“Mrs. Boudreaux,” Dr. Terezakis said confidentially to her
mother, “if your daughter hadn’t come in when she did, she
would have been dead in a month or two.”