Miracle of Saint Marina

Many times, in our lives, as conscious Christians, we invoke God and His Saints. This is exactly what a family from Cyprus did, known from their television appeals two years ago, to find a donor to obtain a graft for surgery on their young child, Andreas, who was suffering from leukemia. A donor was found, and the parents prepared to travel to the USA, where the delicate bone marrow transplant surgery would take place. Before they set off for the surgery, the parents heard about the miracles of Saint Marina and took the initiative to call the monastery of Saint Marina in Andros and ask for Her blessing. On the phone, the abbot of the Monastery, Archimandrite Kyprianos, promised that he would pray to Saint Marina and wished the parents that their child would have Saint Marina in the operating room for help. Indeed, with the blessing of Abbot Kyprianos in their luggage and with unwavering faith in the help of Saint Marina, the two parents and little Andreas traveled to the USA. After the customary preliminary preparatory examinations, little Andreas entered for the truly very serious and delicate surgery. A little while before the surgery, a woman appeared before the doctor who would operate on little Andreas. She said she was a doctor and begged to observe the surgery because she was little Andreas’s personal doctor. The woman’s conversation with the surgeon showed that she possessed medical knowledge and left no doubt in the surgeon’s mind that she was a doctor. He told her, however, that it is not allowed for an outside doctor to be in the operating room and that it is the practice of his medical team not to involve others in these delicate surgeries. However, the woman’s persistence softened the surgeon’s initial stubbornness. He asked her to leave her details at the reception and then enter the operating room with him. And so, it happened. The unknown doctor entered the operating room and not only observed but actively participated in the surgery of little Andreas. Several times, in fact, she gave directions on how the surgery should proceed. Everything went well, and after thanking her, the doctor left the operating room. The Vasiliou couple rushed to find out how the surgery went. “Everything went very well,” he told them. And added: “I just can’t understand how you had such a doctor for your child and came to me?” The parents, surprised, replied that they hadn’t brought any doctor and didn’t know anything about it. However, the surgeon insisted and told them that when the doctor of little Andreas came out of the operating room, she stayed inside for a while with the rest of the medical team. Therefore, she must have been around there somewhere, and she urged them to meet her. In vain, however, they searched to find her. The doctor had disappeared… They thought she had left and went to the secretary’s office after the surgeon’s suggestion to ask for her details in order to thank her. They believed that perhaps a doctor from Greece or Cyprus had been touched and traveled to the USA to contribute to the delicate surgical procedure. To their surprise, they discovered that the unknown female doctor had signed with the name Marina from Andros. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They stood for quite a while, awkwardly, in front of the miracle of Saint Marina. Tears of gratitude and joy filled their eyes. They remembered what the venerable elder and abbot of the eponymous Holy Monastery had told them. “Go to America and I hope Saint Marina is in the operating room.” They conveyed their indescribable joy for the successful outcome of the surgery and the restoration of little Andreas’s health to the media, speaking about the true miracle. Since then, they made a vow to always be together as a family in Andros on the day of Saint Marina’s feast. They do so, and as a monk from the Monastery with whom we spoke twice mentioned, in the years that have passed since then, the Vasiliou family regularly travels from Limassol to Andros every summer to thank Saint Marina, who saved little Andreas. Therefore, the miracles of the Saints have never been absent from the life of our Orthodox Church, and may the All-Good God, our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen our faith with the miracles of our Saints.