Idly, weakly, I reached for the training-talk casket, my thoughts struck numb with wonderment. I had problems. Yes, real problems now. What miracle? What dark miracle? How into the box, the carefully sealed box? What’s to know? And what’s ever to know after this? And then my eyes fell upon it. Oh, the saving of all the cold judgments. What joy! At a corner of the box there was a place of warping—the glue had given way, the short nails had been bested—caused, no doubt, by dampness in the soil. A hole gaped there, quite small, but big! big as the world. . . .
But my joy was short-lived and my extreme relief cut down to its death almost before its real borning. In my mind that night, thinking and thinking, I knew, yes, knew! that such a snake, if it was a snake—such a creature—had never been seen in that part of the country before. I could hardly wait for next day. yes! What strange sign might we not find to help us in the very next training-talk casket. ...
(from “The Worm Re-Turns”)
The theme is still mortality: but instead of attempting to teach it, the hero of this doctor story (or if we must categorize, I suppose it should be a doctor-doctor-doctor story, for two authors and one protagonist), finds himself in a position to operate it.
The doctor-authors here are, respectively, from New York and California, a first-timer and an old-timer in SF. Dr. Smith is an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, whose previous publications have been in “very little magazines” and a college humor magazine. Dr. Nourse is “on extended leave of absence from practice to catch up on writing obligations,” and his list of caught-up-with-and-published writing, in and out of SF, is too long to recite here.
A MIRACLE TOO MANY
Philip H. Smith and Alan E. Nourse
When it first began, Dr. Stephen Olie’s curious gift appeared in the manner of most true miracles, insidiously and without fanfare. At first Dr. Olie wasn’t certain that anything out of the ordinary had happened. Later, when it became obvious that something more than his own native skill as a physician was at work, he refused to accept the idea of a miracle and resisted for weeks the temptation to analyze his gift scientifically. In those rare cases when medical miracles do happen (as indeed they do), few doctors are foolish enough to inquire into them too closely, and fewer still expect them to occur again. But in Dr. Olie’s case, things were disturbingly different.
It happened the first time with the one patient of all his patients that Dr. Olie most dreaded to see. Mary Castle was a small, pale six-year-old whose weekly visit to his office was an ordeal for her mother and her doctor alike. Childhood leukemia is always a fearful illness; in Mary Castle’s case the progress of the disease had been swift and inexorable since diagnosis had been made a few weeks before. In the face of expert consultation, the newest drugs, transfusions and supportive care the little girl had become steadily sicker, until the doctor found himself shrinking from each weekly visit.
Now, as the child and her mother were escorted into his examining room, Dr. Olie reviewed the chart hopelessly. Last week her white blood count had begun climbing again, her hemoglobin level sagging dangerously. He knew that today he would again find the enlarging lymph nodes and distended spleen, the hemorrhagic blotches on the child’s legs, the shortness of breath—all the dreadful stigmata of a cruel and relentless killer. And he knew, bitterly, that he had nothing to offer the child but a word of encouragement and a smile as false as the smile of death itself.
As the office nurse poked her neat head through the door, Dr. Olie closed the chart. A wave of anger and frustration swept through his mind. If only there were something I could do, he thought. If only there could be some magic in my fingers—. Shaking his head, he walked into the examining room and smiled warmly at the child. “Well, Mary, how are you today?”
The little girl tried to return the smile. “All right, I guess.”
“Fine, we’ll just see how things are going.” Gently the doctor examined her skin, checked her throat, then asked her to lie down as he went through the ritual of examination. From the corner the child’s mother watched him, silently and hopelessly. For a moment he studied the listless child on the table and then gently probed with his fingers, feeling the tense spleen almost filling her abdomen. The child looked worse than the week before, her skin grey, her breathing labored.
“Doctor, you’ve got to tell me,” the mother suddenly blurted. “Nothing seems to be helping; how much longer is it going to be?”
Dr. Olie caught the mother’s eye, shook his head in warning. “Why, we’re doing fine!” he said. “Right, Mary? Before long your tummy will be feeling better and your breathing will be better and everything. Of course, we may have to go back to the hospital for another transfusion this week, but that won’t be so bad. After all, if it’s going to make you well—”
His voice trailed off and a chill went up his back as he stared at the girl. While he talked, his hand had been gently probing, and now, suddenly, something had changed. The child’s skin looked more pink and the enlarged spleen, like a deflating balloon, seemed to be shrinking under his fingertips. Even as he watched, a new luster was appearing in the little girl’s eyes and, incredibly, she giggled. “You’re tickling me!”
Dazed, the doctor felt for the swollen lymph nodes and failed to find them. He stared in amazement as the hemorrhages seemed to fade from the child’s skin. Thirty minutes later Mary Castle was a pink and glowing little girl, playing happily in the examining room as they waited for the emergency blood-count report. It was impossible, and Dr. Olie knew it, but the blood count had returned to normal. Two days later the child was exuberantly healthy, eating vast quantities of food and demanding to go back to school.
And nobody understood why, least of all Dr. Olie.
In the busy weeks that followed, Dr. Olie did not forget the strange case of Mary Castle’s miraculous recovery. He simply discredited it. Spontaneous remission of leukemia had been recorded before in medical history (though never so swiftly or dramatically); since Dr. Olie’s scientific mind did not admit of miracles, he just refused to think about the case at all. Instead, he buried himself in the busy routine of his general medical practice with office hours, home calls, deliveries and hospital rounds. He was so busy trying not to think about Mary Castle that he hardly noticed the extreme rapidity with which his everyday office cases seemed to be recovering from their illnesses— the ulcer patients who seemed to be feeling better before they walked out of his office, the pneumonia patients whose fevers broke even while he was listening to their chests, the patients whose abcesses stopped hurting the moment he touched them and were healed completely in 24 hours. There were always the possibilities of coincidence and the well-known vagaries of human illness to call to account for such speedy recoveries—but as time went on, coincidence piled upon coincidence until a case occurred that Dr. Olie simply could not ignore.