Great Physician's Rx for Cancer

Introduction: My Rose ;I lost Grandma Rose to cancer a few months ago. ;She was my last surviving grandparent, and as I helplessly watched cancer emaciate this once-vibrant woman to a skeleton-like seventy pounds, I sat by her bedside and recited poetry, read Scripture, and sang worship songs. I felt helpless as her bladder cancer--like a slow-moving army--invaded her body, plundered her mind, and would eventually snuff out the burning embers of nearly eighty-three years of life. ;While monitoring her labored breathing, I became very emotional as I recalled the memories that bonded us closely together. At the age of twenty, when I had faced my own life-and-death struggle with horrible abdominal and digestive tract diseases, I stayed with Grandma Rose from time to time when my parents needed a break from caring for me. My nurturing grandmother gently pressed a cool cloth to my feverish forehead, spooned homemade chicken soup into my mouth, and cleaned up soiled bed sheets without complaint. When I was hospitalized twice, she insisted on sleeping in a spare bed next to me. Although it wasn't funny at the time, we shared a laugh one night after a nurse slipped into my room at 4 a.m. and wrapped a tourniquet around Grandma Rose's left arm, thinking she was drawing blood from the patient. ;Grandma Rose would have done anything for me--even give a pint of blood. What a remarkable woman! Born in 1922 in a pastoral Polish village that could have doubled as the set of "Fiddler on the Roof," Rose was the youngest of seven children to Gidalia and Simma Catz. An extra hand was always appreciated around the family farm. Her father owned a mill where they pressed poppy seeds and flaxseeds into oil. A taste treat in those days was gathering the pressed seeds and patting them into hard cakes, which were dipped into schmaltz, the rendered fat from chicken soup. ;Her Jewish family faced growing harassment during that uneasy era following World War I. Her oldest brother, Sydney, was persecuted horribly in the Polish Army. Great Grandma Simma helped Sydney escape from the Polish military, and her family arranged for safe passage to the United States. Waiting for him at Ellis Island were several uncles and aunts who had immigrated to America. ;War clouds thickened over Europe in the 1930s. When Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933, he moved quickly to pass repressive anti-Jewish laws--and brutally enforce them with his Brownshirts. Amid this hostile environment, Jewish persecution intensified elsewhere throughout Europe. Fortunately, Rose joined her parents and several siblings and immigrated to the United States in 1935 at the age of thirteen, where the family settled in Queens, New York. They were among the last wave of European Jews to arrive in America prior to World War II. ;Two older sisters, Sonya and Dora, who were married with their own families, stayed behind in Poland, which was not a good place to be if you happened to be Jewish in 1939. Following the Nazi blitzkrieg, her sisters and their families were rounded up and shipped off to the death camps. No Schindler's List could save them. We believe that Rose's sisters and families were murdered inside the gas chambers of Auschwitz. ;After the war, Rose married Alvin Menlowe, an immigrant himself from Czechoslovakia. She gave birth to my mother, Phyllis, and a younger daughter, Debbie. When I came along twenty-five years later, I was a colicky child who cut into my parents' sleeping time. Grandma Rose, who stayed with us periodically, would hide behind my crib when the lights were turned out. Then she would reach out her hand and stroke my forehead. "Jordi, Jordi . . . it's okay," she soothed. "I'm here." ;Another early memory of her hRubin, Jordan S. is the author of 'Great Physician's Rx for Cancer ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780785213833 and ISBN 078521383X.