A Christmas miracle? I was skeptical until it happened to me.
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Version 0 of 1. Call me Scrooge if you must, but I’d always turned up my nose when it came to Christmas miracles. “Bah humbug,” I used to say to all those “miraculous” stories of families reunited, kids’ lives saved and even suicides prevented in such movies as “Miracle on 34th Street,” the teary-eyed Christmas story that introduced me (and the rest of the world) to Natalie Wood, and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Jimmy Stewart classic. That is, until I experienced my own version of a Christmas miracle. Just before bed one evening in fall 1996, I walked over to make sure that Billie, my aging cocker spaniel, had settled comfortably into hers. We had come a long way together since the day I’d gone to pick her up — an 8-week-old puppy, the runt of the litter, my act of defiance. It had been fall 1986, and only weeks earlier I’d been told by my doctor, “You have AIDS. Go home and get used to the idea.” “The idea” was, quite simply, my inevitable death. Instead, I thought, “Shoot. I’ve always wanted a pup of my own.” I paid $300 for Billie, a discount rate, and took her home to the house I shared in Berkeley, Calif., with a friend, David, who had agreed to care for Billie after my death, which an epidemiologist said was probably a year or two away. Every night before bed, I prayed for a miracle. A staunch believer in second opinions, a few weeks later I went to see Marcus Conant, one of the first and best HIV/AIDS physicians in the country. After a new battery of tests, he and I wept as he told me, “You don’t have HIV or AIDS.” I’d been misdiagnosed, in what he described as “human error,” a rare example of good news in a darkening epidemic. So unexpected. So unlikely. I considered this news to be a miracle, which one dictionary defines as “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.” At that moment, I was willing to classify my decision to retest and the discovery of human error as divine intervention. Fast forward to 1996: David and I were no longer housemates but we remained co-parents to Billie, shuttling her every other week between our two places, his in Berkeley, mine in San Francisco. Billie, now 10, had become our “golden girl.” I didn’t find Billie in her pet bed that evening. Instead, she was in the living room, fretfully rubbing her right eye with her paw. I approached on my knees to see what the problem was. One look and I could see trouble: One of her hazel-brown eyes had clouded over; it was nearly opaque. I called the after-hours clinic at our vet and at that late hour he set up an appointment with an eye specialist for the next morning. By then it was too late. “Acute glaucoma,” the vet told us. He was kind but blunt: “Her optic nerve has been crushed and she’s now permanently blind in that eye.” Later that morning, he surgically removed the eye to reduce the intraocular pressure. We left with a warning: “Billie is at heightened risk of glaucoma in her remaining eye.” A year later, I watched Billie clamber out of her bed and walk straight into the door. She fell down a short flight of carpeted stairs. She couldn’t find her water bowl. The rising ocular pressure had detached her retina, and she was now blind in both eyes. “There’s no chance for recovery,” the vet explained, “but dogs are quite adaptable to new circumstances.” Part of his prophesy turned out to be true. After a few days, Billie began what I can only consider a miraculous adjustment to a sightless world, tentatively roaming from room to room, then venturing up and down the stairs. David and I took her on hikes in the Berkeley foothills, keeping her on a leash instead of letting her run free; her clipped tail wagged happily in her wake. Then, a few weeks before Christmas that year, I inadvertently kicked a tennis ball — one of her toys — across the living room. She ran after it and grabbed it with her mouth. I thought, “Amazing how her other senses have heightened to compensate for her lost vision.” Later that week, David called, his voice excited: “Remember the magnolia tree out back? The branches have grown so close to the house that any critter can basically walk in the sunroom window. I was bringing Billie upstairs when I saw this raccoon on the window ledge. Billie saw it, too, and just took off like a bullet towards it.” “This dog is clearly not blind,” David said. I called the vet. He explained again, gently, how adaptable dogs are. “It’s really amazing,” he added. As for us, he suggested we were suffering from “wishful thinking.” I insisted on an office visit. After examining Billie, he had tears in his eyes when he talked to us. “This happens so rarely, but the retina has spontaneously reattached,” the vet said. In all his years of practice, he’d read about but never seen it happen. “This is really a Christmas miracle,” he added. “We called her the ‘miracle dog’ after that,” David reminded me recently. This year marks the 20th since Billie died, and every December I carefully unwrap an ornament that I bought in her memory. Yes, it’s a schmaltzy one, angel wings overlaid with the face of a cocker spaniel. Looking back, I understand that my AIDS misdiagnosis and Billie’s spontaneous remission were far from actual miracles. Both of us suffered from the limits of those attending to our care. But never mind that, I say to myself as I place “her” high on the Christmas tree to remind me — and my visitors — that there’s always the possibility of the highly improbable, highly unexpected. How facing cancer helps you figure out what really matters In this angry and stressed-out time, research says we can learn to be kinder How some simple Christmas ornaments, and friends, helped him transform his sadness. |