I HAVE SPENT THE BETTER part of the past week reacquainting myself with one of life's less enjoyable experiences: the common cold. Except this one apparently never got the memo that it was supposed to remain common. Somewhere around the third day it promoted itself into a full-fledged case of influenza and settled in like a houseguest who had absolutely no intention of leaving.
We live in an age of astonishing medicine. Doctors replace hearts, repair joints, and peer inside our bodies with machines that would have looked like science fiction when I was a boy. We have pills to make us sleep, pills to wake us up, and pharmacies that seem capable of delivering almost anything before you've had time to finish your cup of coffee.
Yet when a fever climbs high enough and you're lying awake in the darkness listening to your own breathing, something curious happens. We all begin hoping for something beyond prescriptions and technology.
For me, that grace has always worn the face of Doña Juana.
The year was 1951. Medical science was making enormous strides after World War II, but much of rural Texas still depended on remedies that had been passed from one generation to the next.
I was four years old when I made the monumental mistake of drinking from a farm well outside Waco that, as it turned out, should probably have come with a warning label.
By that evening I was violently ill.
I was rushed to Providence Hospital, where my condition grew steadily worse. Two nurses who had worked in tropical regions remarked that my symptoms resembled diseases they had encountered overseas. Specialists came and went. They consulted charts, discussed possibilities, prescribed every medication they thought might help.
Nothing worked.
Soon I was connected to intravenous fluids, growing weaker by the day.
Eventually, the doctors admitted what no family ever wants to hear. They had exhausted their options.
A priest was summoned to administer the Last Rites.
My mother could barely remain in the room. Every time she tried, she would break down in tears and have to leave.
Then my Uncle Roy quietly decided it was time to try something medicine couldn't offer.
He climbed into his car and drove about thirty miles into the Texas countryside to a tiny town called Rosebud. He wasn't looking for another specialist. He was looking for my father's Aunt Juana.
To everyone who knew her, she was simply Doña Juana.
She possessed no medical degree. She had never attended nursing school. There was no framed diploma hanging on her wall.
She was a curandera, a folk healer whose reputation had spread through Central Texas not because she advertised, but because people told one another.
She arrived at my bedside carrying no doctor's bag. No stethoscope. No bottles of medicine.
Only faith.
For the next two days she scarcely left my room. She prayed quietly, hour after hour, holding a small cross she had fashioned from dried palm leaves left over from Palm Sunday. There was nothing theatrical about her. She spoke softly, prayed steadily, and refused to surrender.
On the eighth or ninth day, something happened that no one had expected.
The fever broke.
That afternoon I managed to keep down a bowl of broth she prepared.
The next day I stood on my own legs.
Within forty-eight hours I was well enough to leave the hospital.
The doctors signed my release papers.
Years passed.
By the time I reached high school, I had acquired just enough education to become skeptical of nearly everything. Family stories have a way of improving with age, and I wondered if this one had become larger in the retelling.
So I finally asked our longtime family physician, Dr. L. D. Collins.
"Was it really true?"
He looked at me quietly for a long moment.
"Tony," he finally said, "I wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't been standing there myself. But the truth is, Doña Juana saved your life."
Years later I asked Doña Juana herself exactly what she had been saying during those long hours beside my hospital bed.
Surely there had been some ancient prayer, some mysterious healing ritual handed down through generations.
She smiled.
"It was just the Rosary."
Then she paused.
"But between the mysteries," she said, "I kept calling in Spanish, 'Tony... come back. Tony... don't leave us.'"
I've never forgotten those words.
A few years later I drove out to Rosebud to visit her.
Her modest little house had become something of an unofficial clinic. Cars arrived throughout the day and often into the night. Families came carrying sick children. Elderly couples came seeking comfort. Others simply came because hospitals had given them little hope.
There was no sign in the yard.
No waiting room.
No receptionist.
Just an humble home where strangers knocked on the door believing someone inside might help.
I asked her one afternoon what special gift she possessed that allowed her to accomplish what trained physicians sometimes could not.
She almost seemed embarrassed by the question.
"I go to Mass every morning," she said. "Then I come home and pray."
That was her answer.
No claims of miracles.
No promises.
No talk of extraordinary powers.
Just faith.
I've spent my career interviewing presidents, athletes, entertainers, and people whose names filled newspaper headlines. I've seen history unfold from front-row seats more than once.
Yet whenever someone asks whether I believe miracles still happen, my mind doesn't travel to cathedrals or revival meetings.
It goes to a little house outside Rosebud, Texas.
And to an elderly woman who sat beside the bed of a dying four-year-old boy...
...and simply refused to let him go.
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author, is a writer-at-large and the national political writer for LAMonthly.org. His forthcoming biography about Marilyn’s childhood and youth, THE GIRL WHO WOULD BE MARILYN MONROE, will be published in September by Bloomsbury. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.