My here little girl, my student, my artist, remained. I focused on her. Those weeks, an unusually large chorus of voices of friends and brothers remembered her and celebrated each day bravely endured to the end. Alexia, who playfully turned herself into a relic-shelf on the day of the Saints' Visit, survived the three critical days of chemotherapy bombardment (days when other children, wildly, programmatically intoxicated, turn gray, vomit and writhe in pain, unable to eat due to nausea), without accusing any discomfort. She would jump in bed and ask for bananas, saying she was starving. Mrs. D. was surprised. On the third day, she disconnected her from the machines and released her towards a new trial, and they embarked on the healing journey across seas and lands. She wrote to me, in an explosion of enthusiasm: “I’m wireless, madam!” Does it seem trivial? If you've been there, to see the alternative, it's not.
We must learn to value peace. Peace itself is an overwhelming miracle. Joy is a miracle. These were the first miracles.
The commission of saints, who themselves, in their time, had passed through hospitals and sufferings, and especially through persecutions, camps, and prisons, was set from the first moment to change something. It met secretly and collaborated humbly, in such a way that no one could know who exactly took this child into their arms. They reunited thirstily in the One-Christ and each poured out their capillary of life towards her. They began by gathering the monstrous forms of cancer that had initially hatched in the body and binding them into a single tense and aggressive worm. Arriving at a renowned clinic somewhere in the world, doctors were surprised that such a thing could happen in just three days of treatment at our institute. The wound remained confined to a single eye. Usually, it slips into the other, causes complete loss of sight, then crosses the threshold into the brain and kills.
This child was determined by the group of doctors to martyrize the swift removal of the rotten eye, within a few hours, precisely on her birthday. Her 'cakes' were the anesthetic injections.
It was the day when some of my loved ones celebrated their patron saint's day with light in Essex, it was the anniversary of the heavenly birth of Saint Sophrony, a cancer healer consecrated in the literature of miracles. A place where our little girl's pain was remembered and from where the holy Father probably apologized for being absent for an hour or two. Also, that day, July 11th, was the one-month anniversary of the feast in Simferopol. The world's most popular eye doctor, who gave medicine the most powerful surgical treatises, who himself lost his sight operating on tens of thousands of others and who, at the end of his life, by touch alone, healed by touch, by the caress of his prayerful palm, Dr. Voino-Yasenetsky, Archbishop Luke of Crimea, had been celebrated on June 11th. And he was always present in the ward.
It was a summer of hard struggle, I myself believed that the wonderful little girl was persistently courted by Heaven. After she lost her little eye, she wasn't recovering, she wasn't healing anymore, we only had shocking news, all related to how many houses you have to sell in this country to buy an extra month of stay in a clinic in another state.
My beloved ones from the city and even from other distant lands then gathered their voices in symphonies of akathists, at determined hours, towards a fan of summoned saints. The Mother of God and Christ were called to help, Saints Nicholas, Nectarios, Luke, Sophrony, George, Alexius, Panteleimon, Ephraim the New, John the Russian, the Unmercenary Healers, the Modern Martyrs. Each with their guard, with their weapon. With the spear, the healing herbs, or the scalpel, they cleansed the child's body paths of the monstrous forms.
And yet, on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, I received a wonderful gift. Unexpected news. Doctors in Austria managed to isolate and remove the part attacked by cancer and declared the little girl, after a battle that seemed lost, incredibly cured, completely victorious. They performed a multitude of tests and were amazed that the disease's spores had not spread anywhere in her body. No trace, neither in her limbs, nor in her bones, nowhere. Normally, she wouldn't have survived. They wrote, as a comment, on every page of her medical history: "...Atypical. Atypical." They're sending her home! She's walking! Seeing! Living! We'll welcome her among us at school from day one!
For the joy and gratitude experienced, I now only have downcast eyes. After the acute realization of Ionuț's departure, I thought I was losing her too. I worried and struggled for months out of disbelief. I am an artist, I paint only in silence, I should have realized that you must be quiet when God is working!
(to be continued)
Cosmina Dragomir
Photography by Noemia Prada
See the other episodes here: The Beautiful Scrawny Ones