“Sister……please cure my cancer without shaving my head……” A little girl in a white dress with her long black hair held in twin pony braids rushed to me, crying and pleading.
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I gently wiped away the tears flowing all over her little porcelain face, answered her softly but firmly :”I will.”
The little girl seemed reassured . The fear and despair that clouded her giant crystalline eyes dissipated , she began to glance around curiously. The lab studio was bare and white with the exception of the glass ceiling through which we could see the vast darkness of the night sky, furnished only with all-white equipment and a white single bed, accompanied with her plain white dress and my white lab coat. The only splash of colour out of this overwhelming white is my red plaid skirt seen discreetly through the front opening of my white coat.
Outside the austere but soothing tranquil white stood two worried adults . One was Dr Wu who suggested the shaving of hair to prevent infection during chemotherapy , the other was the mom distraught over her daughter evading treatment in order to protect her long hair. The two dangers to the girl’s shiny long hair were blocked by an electronic door secured with a digital vocab puzzle lock . The only way to open it from outside was to spell out three synonyms with different initials to a given word within 30 seconds. I was pretty sure neither of them had enough vocab size to solve the puzzle.
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It was a grave moment. Outside the sturdy digital door the vexed mother shouted at her daughter to not be so willful, frantically clicking random letters trying to solve the puzzle. Inside , the poor girl grabbed my skirt, trying to seek some comfort from its texture. I had to push away her gently as I need the red skirt to be untouched for its magic to work.
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Gathering my wits, the red skirt glowed faintly. In my brain I visualised the wicked proteins stopping the immature B cells to differentiate and the structures of the enzymes that could hydrolyse them. Without losing sight of the real world, I could see how the precursors of the enzymes are made with great ease from what I had in the lab and how they break down the oncoproreins slickly after they are turned into their active forms in cellular environment.
I promptly input the formulae of the enzymes into the computer of my organic molecule generator.
“Sister, you have the cure?”
”Yes I have found it.”
Above us through the glass ceiling the stars shone bright in the velvet blue night sky. So bright that each point of light seemed to be pulsing with a ringing.
Photo by Ryan Klaus on Unsplash
“What’s it? ”
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“It’s an enzyme. It’s a special protein that will break down the bad proteins produced by some of your cells that disorient them to proliferate uncontrollably instead of differentiating .”
“Here is its solution .Just drink it like water since it’s colourless and tasteless.”
The little girl grabbed over the glass bottle and examined it carefully . She then took a deep breath and gulped the potion .
Listening to her guzzling the solution down, relief and solace flew through me like clear water down a parched throat.
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“Sister, what’s going to happen next?”
“The enzymes will break down the MLL-AF4 protein, which is the evil protein that confers your cells that have trouble differentiating additional advantages. ”
“Will the bad cells go away with the bad protein?”
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
“Exactly, the cells will get kill themselves or be killed by the immune system once they are not armed with the evil protein.”
“Let’s count stars on the ceiling and enjoy the night. Your red blood cells should restore to a functional level the moment you wake up.”
After what might have been the deepest slumber I ever had, I woke up to the brilliant golden-blue of the sky over the glass ceiling. Everything was in a vitalising bath of sunshine. Everything was gold and energetic.
“Sister! I am well! The potion worked!”
The little girl seemed joyful and ebullient.
“Sister, my cancer has gone?”
I collected a drop of blood on her fingertip and placed it under the microscope. I held my breath, looked into the eyepiece and saw a view of cheerful red dots duly interspersed with clearly differentiated white cells.
The sinister lymphoblasts that pervaded the view yesterday vanished without a trace.
I handled the little girl the microscope let her look into the eyepiece.
“It’s the healthy red you told me yesterday!” She exclaimed.
“Mom said that I have to choose between hair and life. But now I have both hair and life.”
“Don’t you?”
The golden light framed our long hair, swaying gently the morning breeze.
