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When I was five years old, I had Bright’s disease, a disease in which both kidneys get blocked.
All the poisons build up in you and you bloat and bloat and bloat. I got so big it took a few people to move me from bed to bed and from the bed to the hospital.
In those days, in the 1930s before antibiotics, nothing, nothing could be done for anyone with this disease. It ran its course and then you died.
The doctor told my mother, “You might as well take her home. She only has a couple of days to live and better she’s with family.”
I remember being brought home, and I remember the bed they put me in. My mother stayed by my side and cried, and she said to the Mother of God, “If you heal her, Mother of God, I promise to dress her in blue and white for ¼” I can’t remember how long.
Well, I started to beg for yogurt. In those days, most people in Canada had never heard of yogurt, but my family was Lebanese and we ate it. So my mother called the doctor and asked him if she could give me some.
He said, “Poor thing; she’s dying. Give her anything she wants.” So they gave me yogurt.
I don’t know how long after that, that day or the next, but everything drained out of me. My family thought I was dying and they gathered around me crying, and they called the doctor.
He said, “My goodness, it’s a miracle! Her kidneys are working!”
After that I started to get better, and the doctors in Sudbury where we lived started to look into the properties of yogurt.
My mother dressed me in blue and white until I went to school where we had to wear uniforms. But she continued to put blue ribbons in my hair for I don’t know how long. I can’t remember, maybe all through grade school.
The author is a staff worker of Madonna House, and is now in her nineties.
