To say I was amazed would be an understatement: Infant’s fever treatment

Michele O’Donnell’s story
My baby daughter Linda was quite prone to fevers, and it was one of those incidents that led me to call on the help of a far wiser and more mature woman than myself. My request was that she accompany me to the doctor’s office, but her response was something that I never imagined. She said that she would come right over and take me if I would do something while she was on her way. She told me to kneel next to Linda (who was lying on a beanbag on the floor, bright red and burning up with fever) and place my hands on her head and quietly and calmly tell the fever to leave her. Quietly and calmly was certainly the key here. If I remained in the frightened and agitated state which I was in when I called for help, I could not have accomplished this. As long as I was giving the appearance such power by my fearful reaction, the problem would remain. I was playing victim to the situation, having no idea the power available to me to correct it. At first I thought she was kidding me, but when I learned she was not, I said I would “try it” so long as she still was on her way to get us and go for real help if it didn’t work. As soon as she hung up, I did exactly what she requested. I found that if I sang a song or two for Linda first, we both would calm down. Within minutes after singing the songs and telling the fever to leave, it was gone. Usually when a fever breaks, the patient begins to perspire profusely, but this she did not do. It simply was not there anymore. When my friend arrived, everything was calm and under control. To say that I was amazed would be an understatement.


Michele’s advice: Suffering, while it comes as a physical entity, does not necessarily need to be dealt with on that level. We are not in a helpless state when faced with it.

Read one of our baby stories with a happy ending, or read more from Michele Longo O’Donnell’s book, Of Monkeys and Dragons: Freedom from the Tryanny of Disease.

Where his Gall toward Eisenhower Came From: A surgical error

Sometimes surgical errors change people's lives in odd ways. Indeed, sometimes the lives of many people are affected--though we don't learn about it for quite a long time. One example appeared in this month's Atlantic magazine, 50 years after the fact.

Anthony Eden, the long-time Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, underwent an operation to remove his gall bladder, and the surgery was botched. For the rest of his life he was plagued by the after-effects; he needed four later operations to undo the damage.

During a crisis in the Middle East in 1956, Britain reasserted its colonial interests in the Suez Canal, joining France and Israel in fighting the Egyptians. Pres. Eisenhower tried to get Eden and the British to withdraw. Angrily Eisenhower demanded in a phone call, "Have you gone out of your mind?!" The answer in the Atlantic article: "Probably yes: Eden had undergone a botched operation which had nicked his bile duct and was suffering from what might politely have been called 'stress.'" In describing the ill effects of the earlier surgery, one of Eden's later surgeons wrote that Eden had a fever of 106 degrees at the time, and concluded that he was subject to recurrent fevers and postoperative disability at important times in his career and during international crises. The surgical error that had occurrred in 1953 apparently affected the lives of British, French, Israeli, and Egyptian soldiers, and their families, three years later.

Read another story of a surgical error affecting a famous ruler or read Christopher Hitchens' article, "Imperial Follies," Atlantic, January/February 2007.