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THE STORY OF THE ORGASM MACHINE
MARTHA WAS DYING. She knew it, as did her husband, her friends, and her son. Her cancer, though still incurable, was treatable, but the treatment would only prolong her dying. She knew there was a tiny chance that a cure might be found while she was still alive. But would it be available to save her life before she was too debilitated by the consequences of the disease and the treatment to be able to live her saved life? Plenty of people seriously believed in miracles. In fact, the belief in miracles was so widespread it had spawned a small industry. Martha was embarrassed by and for her heretofore rational friends who suddenly began to talk to her about miracles. She pretended not to hear, to avoid mutual embarrassment once they came to their senses.
For Martha, science was the only possible source of "a miracle." But the chances for a cure were slight. Only a preventative, like hand-washing or the Salk vaccine, would save the people who would have died, rather than a cure for those already dying, of this malignancy.
Martha was old enough to remember the amazed sound still in the voices of her elders when they told stories about the miraculous cures wrought by penicillin when it was first introduced. An aunt she had never known, Aunt Cecilia, had died from strep throat in the days when, as her parents always put it, "strep was a killer." Her relatives always spoke about this long dead Cecilia with a strange damp sound in their throats. "If she had just lived long enough...why, she would have lived!" it was a never-solved mystery in her family, why Cecilia had gotten strep throat that time instead of another time, just a year later, when it could easily have been cured. Would her descendants someday talk about her cancer with this same damp sound?
Because of her son's annual childhood strep infections, the story of Cecilia who hadn't lived long enough to live had always been vivid in Martha's collection of touchstone stories. She had known those who had actually been there when the great thing--a CURE--had happened. She listened to Jerry Lewis's Labor Day promises that this year...