One, Two, Three, Close Your Eyes

I’m sitting on the worn carpet in my grandmother’s apartment in downtown Warsaw watching TV. It is 1989, and I am twelve years old. The small screen of the boxy television set zooms in on a man’s face. He has the severe haircut of a monk or a Romulan. Counting off in Russian, один, два три, he tells the audience to close their eyes and listen to his voice. He is Anantoly Kashpirovsky, a Soviet- Ukrainian psychotherapist and a hypnotist who has become famous in the USSR and Poland after demonstrating that he can induce anaesthesia during surgeries remotely through a TV transmission. He claims he can cure a variety of ailments and conditions, from bedwetting to cancer. And people believe him. Kashpirovsky is watched by over seventy percent of Poles. The streets of Warsaw become deserted when his program is on, a phenomenon only exceeded in 1985, when ninety percent of people watched the Brazilian telenovela Isaura: the Slave Girl, about a light-skinned woman resisting the never-ending attempts of rape by a stream of lascivious slavers.

Kashpirovsky’s popularity and his mass following puzzle researchers even today. The explanations focus on the political and economic situation in Poland. In 1989 Poland was the first country in the Eastern Block to have a democratic election and the Communist government had lost. Solidarity had won. People expected their lives to improve immediately, however, moving towards a free-market economy resulted in double digit inflation, increased debt, unemployment, price hikes, and crises in every aspect of society, including healthcare. People were disappointed and desperate, distrustful of authority. The ground was ripe for a miracle worker.

Kashpirovsky became friends with Lech Walesa, other politicians, and famous personalities. Even the Polish Roman Catholic Church, which during Communism had organized spiritual and practical help for the citizens and worked with the opposition, had lost power in 1989. The Church needed to regain its influence over the people. The ruling clergy invited Kashpirovsky to perform his seances at the holiest Polish site—the Jasna Góra Monastery which houses the miraculous Black Madonna icon. Kashpirovsky was compared to Rasputin, the Russian mystic and healer, who manipulated the family of Nicolas the Second to influence the politics of the Russian Empire, and eventually led to the fall of the Romanov dynasty.

My parents, both with university degrees, hoped Kashpirovsky would cure the migraines that had been plaguing me since I turned seven years old. He didn’t help me, but apparently thousands of people wrote him letters of thanks. Why did my parents fall under his spell? My father was an electrical engineer, but he was interested in the occult and the mystical. I remember his stories about the power of ancient Mayan priests to remove hearts from their human sacrifices by opening human chests with precise movements of their fingers, like pinching salt over a dish, without causing bleeding or killing their victims. (This story initiated a series of wild games with our friends.)

In a kitchen cupboard my father kept a collection of herbs. He brewed teas to treat common colds and infections; in our otherwise empty liquor cabinet he concocted a homemade cure-all tincture of Baltic amber dissolved in vodka, which he would apply to my neck and wrists when I had a headache, and would use himself for indigestion or arthritic pain; in the bathroom he set up a contraption with a silver coin connected to two electrodes to produce colloidal silver solution. He owned a collection of dowsing rods and pendulums which he used to detect underground streams in our apartment. He then placed shells, horse chestnuts, and custom-built anti-radiators with simple circuits under our beds and other high-risk areas, to counteract the negative radiation of flowing water.

My father was a man who could hold the rational/scientific along with the occult/supernatural in his mind, and accept equal likelihood of both possibilities.

My mother, a teacher with a double Master’s degree in Polish language and history was a very religious person and a loving wife who, while she ran the house and took care of practicalities, echoed all his opinions and political views. So it might not be surprising that both my parents would believe in charlatans like Kashpirovsky, in alternative medicine, folk cures, herbalism, acupuncture and so on. And as their daughter, had I already been primed to follow in that direction?

Apparently, Kashpirovsky emigrated to the US in 1995, where he remained quite popular among the Russian émigrés. He is still alive and has a YouTube channel. He now claims he can cure COVID.

Fast forward six years and now I’m a first-year student in the Life Sciences program at Queen’s University. We had immigrated to Canada three years before. One weekend night in my dorm room alone, (my roommate travels home almost every weekend, whereas I don’t have a lot of money and prefer to spend them on novels rather than on bus trips to Toronto), I touch my left breast and feel a hard lump. I’m very skinny and flat-chested, and at first I think it’s just a weird-shaped bump on my rib, but it is too round and slips under my fingertips like a fava bean. I cannot believe it—I hardly have breasts but somehow have managed to grow a substantial sized tumour. For a while I keep hoping it will go away on its own, I touch it often, until I finally accept that it is definitely there, but I’m afraid to see a doctor. And not just because I’m scared of cancer, but because I would have to undress in front of him. I don’t tell anyone, because I’m too embarrassed, not even my parents because my mother would panic and tell all her friends. The lump and breast cancer is all I can think about, I don’t want to have to go through chemo, mastectomy or die—I feel like I have just started my life, I haven’t even had a boyfriend or my first kiss yet. I’m a late bloomer, but since breast cancer is a disease of middle-aged women—in that respect I’m ahead. I still hope the lump will magically disappear. I pray for a miracle every day because at that age I still believe in God and attend mass every Sunday at St. Mary’s with friends.

Then I have a revelation—I remember a bioenergy therapist somewhere on Roncesvalles Avenue in Toronto, the Polish part of the city, whom I have seen about my migraines a few times to appease my parents. I tell them I’ve decided to try him again and they are delighted.

While my mother shops for Polish smoked kiełbasa, pierogi, sourdough rye, makowiec and pączki in Polish grocery stores, I sit in the small waiting room along with other desperate people. I read my anatomy and physiology textbooks while waiting. The cost of a session is, from what I remember, about fifty dollars, which I hand over to the receptionist, a middle-aged balding Polish guy who insists on using the diminutive form of my name, whispers that he is a filmmaker much too close to my ear, and asks if I would like to be in his films. I laugh in his face, I suspect these are not the kind of indie films that win awards. He sits in an empty chair next to me and chats me up. He runs his hand on the inside of my bare arm. The next time I place my winter jacket and bag on the seat beside me and ignore his persistent stares. During research for this essay I find out that a Polish bioenergy therapist in Mississauga was accused of sexual harassment by a mother and her daughter, both of whom were his patients. I don’t know if it was the same man.

As I wait, I observe the other people, among them a woman whose little daughter has Down syndrome. I’m surprised that anyone would believe a trisomy could be cured, but I don’t register the irony of my sitting there with a medical textbook open in my lap.

The bioenergy healer puts his hand over my breast and asks me why my heart is racing and why I’m so red-faced. I hate being there, but I am desperate. Eventually, a medical doctor asks me the same thing as he examines me.

When I think of myself from that time, I feel a kind of frustrated tenderness for how my fear of disease and death was equal to my shame of my body; how I chose to not share this traumatizing experience with anyone, not my parents or siblings, or my best friend. I was afraid if I spoke about it and how it made me feel, cancer would become real, and I would shatter in a mental crisis. Somehow, at my very core, I believed a breast lump made me deficient and it was my fault. I still hoped for a miracle, even as a passionate student of science.

What made them break through this way of thinking, stop going to the healer and see a doctor? Maybe that was the actual miracle, that I finally became sober-minded about it. I think that at some point my rational mind took over—the lump was not getting smaller, nothing changed after several visits, the treatment wasn’t working. I finally realized that if I wait for too long, I might die.

I was lucky to reach this point, (J had the lump removed and it was benign) but I realize that some people might never, and might not need to. For example, the mother of the little girl very likely knew that there was no medical cure for her daughter’s condition, therefore she had nothing to lose by seeing a healer. Perhaps he even made her feel more hopeful and appreciative of the miracle of who her daughter was. People whose problems are psychological, might be helped by a placebo, or a version of psychological counselling that Kashpirovsky offered at a time when psychotherapy was virtually non-existent, and mental or emotional issues were stigmatized. Temporarily feeling better might seem like a miracle. 

How does one define a miracle anyway? Why do people who pray to religious paintings or go on pilgrimages to holy places like Jasna Góra or Lourdes ask for cures only for the conditions or diseases that might heal spontaneously, like remission of cancer, partial paralysis, psychological blindness, depression from grief? No one ever prays for something that we all know is physiologically impossible, such as a limb to grow back, or a new tooth, or the raising of the dead? If there is a line between possible and impossible miracles, then it is not a true miracle, is it? But then again, Kashpirovsky claimed that he could heal cavities and make patients grow new teeth.

I think what people who believe in miracles and miracle-makers have in common, which goes hand in hand with denial, is the need for hope. Hope is something medicine does not offer—instead it gives us probability and statistics, a likelihood of a chance—for a cure, or survival, or to live for x more years. A kind of limited, less attractive sister of hope. Chance requires work, it can be challenging; one can do things to increase a chance of beating cancer, reaching remission, or avoiding a respiratory infection. Whereas hope (along with denial), is the easier, less painful way, which allows you to just lead your life as before, and simply pray and wait.

Let’s travel forward in time once more. It’s now the year 2000. I’m doing my Masters in Microbiology, working on a simian virus protein that was found to cause cancer in humans. One day my voice fails and I’m unable to talk unless I pinch my nose closed with my fingers; when I drink, water flows out my nose, and my throat is unable to swallow. I am very tired and weak all the time. I keep going to the ER because I don’t have a family doctor, but after swabbing my throat for an infection they send me home. This happens several times. Finally, my immunology professor gives me an address of a laryngologist and instructs me to go there directly, without a referral. At this point I haven’t been able to eat for days, and when I try to talk, I sound like a person hard of hearing. The specialists can’t find anything wrong with me and send me to the neurology department, who give me a hospital bed immediately because I might stop breathing at any time. After a long process involving trips to hospitals across Ontario to see different specialists, and a surgery, I’m finally diagnosed with a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disorder and prescribed medication that ruins my metabolism. My life is over as I know it. I’m devastated. I’m only twenty-one. Over the following years, specialists are puzzled; all their treatments, intravenous antibody infusions, plasma exchange, and multiple immunosuppressive drugs fail to improve my health. They can only describe my illness as intractable. It turns out that you can lose your faith in medicine just like you lose your faith in God. Sometimes they go hand in hand.

The doctor who initially treats me at Kingstons General laughs behind my back at my attempts to diagnose myself by reading scientific articles even though I have the background to understand them; my first specialist is a young doctor who tells me “to give him my lovely smile” every time I see him, while my face swells up from medicine. I become depressed by my medically induced weight gain and limited mobility. The second specialist who follows me after I move to Edmonton for my PhD in cell biology shares with me how she has been devastated by failing to diagnose something in one of her patients, and then she disappears, and no one knows what happened to her. I suspect she had a nervous breakdown—she had been the nicest, and the only, doctor I had known, who genuinely cared for her patients. Her successor is the worst doctor I ever had—he makes me feel guilty for feeling upset that my medication continuously increases my weight just before my wedding, and yells at me that other people, like himself, have real problems—he is in the middle of a divorce. I cry every time I leave his office. Before I move back to Ontario, he delays writing me a referral letter to a new specialist, and I’m forced to beg him for it, for months. He throws it at me when I come to pick it up just days before I have to leave. What all these doctors have in common, in addition to being unable to control my symptoms, is that they are imperfect human beings who can have a horrible bedside manner, make mistakes, and have limited knowledge. And I have learned to not trust them completely, to double check side effects and drug interactions of every prescription, and to ask questions.

I end up abandoning my PhD because of my health and moving back to Ontario with my husband. We unsuccessfully try to have a child and I become quite depressed. Since traditional medicine can barely keep me functioning, (on bad days my husband has to help me dress and floss my teeth, I can’t talk and have double vision), I’m desperate enough to find something else. To try anything. I tell myself, being a scientist, that it won’t hurt to try, it will be an interesting experience, and I will know that I’ve done everything I could. Including acupuncture for infertility, which seems quite respectable in comparison to the other things I try.

A homeopathic doctor, whom I find online, claims he has cured himself of the same neurological disease. His treatment includes phone conversations during which he asks me “how does that make you feel” after every statement I make, and I soon run out of synonyms for desperate, depressed, and unhappy. Sometimes he asks me strange questions such as how do I feel about relieving myself in public, and I don’t know if he means public bathrooms or like a dog in a park, but I suspect it is the latter. He prescribes several homeopathic medications, which are small sugar spheres infused with infinite dilutions of strange ingredients. When I tell him that, during my Masters, my labmates and I were exposed to high levels of radioactivity, and that I lived in Poland during the Chernobyl crisis, he prescribes me pills that supposedly contain miniscule amounts of bark and leaves of a tree that survived the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima. He is surprised that it doesn’t cure me. I stop seeing him immediately. This has become too ridiculous even for me.

I try something else. I travel to Kitchener to see a reiki specialist. He is a middle-aged man with sparse, longish hair, scraggly chin and thin wire glasses. I lie down on a massage bed in the basement of his house. His wife, a science professor, and his stepson live upstairs. The first thing he says to me is, How long have you felt like you don’t want to exist, and I start crying. I feel a huge relief that someone knows and I don’t have to say it out loud. I’m even more shocked when he says next, as he hovers his hands over me, Don’t worry, you will be a mother. I’m astonished that he knows these things about me immediately, without asking questions. It is very easy to believe that he has special powers, that he can read my thoughts. I don’t remember how much I had told him about myself when we first met—it has been many years, but likely only that I had a chronic illness. I was aware, even then, that simply by looking at me anyone could easily guess that I was depressed. My age and being married, made it easy to assume I might want a child but that my illness or something else had made it difficult. I’m certain that he was just a very observant, insightful person, and a good psychologist. I saw him a few more times because even though he didn’t cure my illness or decrease its symptoms, he made me feel more hopeful and lighter. I remember he also said that my life was going to change, which obviously is true about anyone, in any situation, but at that time it gave me hope when I had none. He also told me to have sex with my husband on a specific weekend to get pregnant and we did. Unfortunately, I miscarried after five weeks, but by then I had stopped seeing him, because I felt psychologically stronger and more positive.

What I needed at that time was to see a psychologist but for some reason it had never occurred to me. Or perhaps seeing one would mean admitting to myself how depressed I really was, and since for the longest time my survival mechanism had been denial, breaking through that would have crushed me. It turns out that in my case, a person with a chronic illness that various doctors had repeatedly failed to improve (without very high levels of drugs with horrendous side effects), what helped the most was when someone noticed my emotions and saw me as a person, not a medical case. Someone who offered me hope, sensed how I felt, and had the audacity to convince me that things would change, and that I should not give up.

Surprisingly my health has greatly improved in the last few years. I could say I’m in remission with minimal symptoms, for now. There are many factors that are known to influence remission in my case, low level stress, my age, my gender, my pregnancies, the new medications and treatment combinations I have received in the last decade. If my mother were alive, she would have called it a miracle and said that her prayers had been answered. Unfortunately, it happened two years after her death. I believe that she died because she chose to ignore her symptoms and refused to see a doctor. Perhaps she would have been still alive if she had.

It is interesting how the current political and economic climate in the world parallels the situation in the Soviet Bloc in 1989. The rise of autocratic governments and their oligarch elites, wars and conflict in Europe and the Middle East, the increasing distrust in government institutions, including publicly funded healthcare, as a consequence of its failure to educate and protect the public from the ongoing pandemic, and finally, the loss of faith in democracy itself, has left us ripe for the next charlatan around the corner.

Will we be too sceptical, too rational to fall for one?

Recent history indicates that we might not be. Until we regain trust in science, medicine, and democracy, I think we need a miracle more than ever.

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Photo graciously provided by Lanta Greece from Unsplash.