Free No Greater Love by William Kienzle Page A

afflicted young life.
    She asked the priest to exorcise her daughter. Mrs. Zawalich could come to no other conclusion than that the girl was possessed by the devil.
    The mother had just read The Exorcist. She saw in that book a young girl not unlike Andrea. The child in the novel had a very normal life until, out of the blue, strange things began to happen.
    Granted, Andrea was not projectile vomiting. Her head did not turn 360 degrees. Indeed, none of the preternatural events that plagued the fictional girl had been evidenced in Andrea. But, Mrs. Zawalich reasoned, theirs was a very religious home; it seemed only natural that Andrea’s torment was the devil’s work.
    The doctor had found no physical cause. The condition had not resolved itself as he had suggested it would. To the mother there was no answer other than the supernatural. And it wasn’t the sort of supernatural manifestation that could be laid at God’s door.
    What else? The devil!
    And the cure? Exorcism!
    The young priest was tempted to laugh. Fortunately he could detect the terror in the little girl’s demeanor.
    How would I react, the priest reflected, if my mother or father presented me as a child to a parish priest to have Satan knocked out of me? I would be terror-stricken—just as Andrea was.
    The priest asked Mrs. Zawalich to tell him in the greatest possible detail just how this phenomenon had developed. He listened carefully.
    The priest was not a physician, nor had he any medical training. But he couldn’t help returning to some sort of physical cause for Andrea’s distress—this despite the family doctor’s diagnosis.
    The priest had a friend, a young doctor in whom he had a lot of confidence. With great difficulty, he finally persuaded Mrs. Zawalich to take Andrea to this doctor, if for no other reason than to get a second opinion. A second opinion before they could consider an exorcism. The priest himself phoned the doctor and set up the appointment.
    The new physician examined Andrea. He was sure of his diagnosis, but in view of the circumstances, he referred Andrea to an endocrinologist for corroboration.
    The endocrinologist confirmed the GP’s finding: hypothyroidism—an underactive thyroid gland.
    Treatment was relatively simple. Andrea would take a replacement thyroid hormone, probably for the rest of her life.
    After all that misery, anxiety, fear, confusion, depression, apprehension, self-rejection—not to mention the harassment from her peer group and her parents’ unhappiness with her—the resolution of Andrea’s problem was almost anticlimactic: a textbook case.
    Their family physician had made an error that was rectified by another family practitioner and confirmed by a specialist.
    From that time on, Andrea tried to make her thyroid imbalance relevant to her life as well as to the lives of others who needed her understanding.
    The family doctor took the news of his misdiagnosis in stride. Mr. and Mrs. Zawalich returned to him with renewed if unearned confidence.
    Andrea became again that pretty little girl she had been before her thyroid gland had betrayed her.
    But the scars were there. She now knew what it was to be a leper, an outcast, an object of scorn. She had tasted both worlds, the accepted and the rejected, and she would never forget.
    Unlike Patty Donnelly, Andrea had never wished to be a priest. Partly that was because of her experience in trying to become an altar minister (in the days when—as far back as anyone could remember—they were known as altar boys). When her parish priest refused her request to be an altar boy—or altar girl—she asked why. The response was: “You are unworthy.”
    Patty Donnelly had reacted differently to a similar experience; in her case it simply added fuel to her desire to fight on to the priesthood.
    Andrea Zawalich knew, from the school of hard knocks, that there were worse things in life than not being