From the Ancaster News - Friday, January 7, 2005

By Erin Rankin

Like any empty nester, Karen Zizzo wears a smile that could light a room since her son, Steven, arrived home to spend his Christmas holidays with the family. Attending medical school at the University of Sydney, Australia, 15,562 kilometres away, Steven has to travel a little further than the average student.

"Living in Australia is fantastic," the 25-year-old said. "Australians are like Canadians in summer."

Full of energy and drive, Steven eagerly shares his plans for the future.

"I am hoping to work at some point with my father. And I would like to write a book."

Her son's visit is not the only reason Ms. Zizzo feels so incredibly fortunate to have Steven at her side this holiday season. She remembers a time in her life when she almost lost him to a rare and very deadly form of cancer.

"The doctors told my husband, Richard and I, Steven had at most three months to live," said Ms. Zizzo.

When Steven was seven years old, a painful lump suddenly appeared on his neck, which Mr. Zizzo noticed one day after hockey practice. A medical doctor with his own practice, Mr. Zizzo knew immediately it could be potentially serious. Not wanting to diagnose Steven himself, they took Steven to their family doctor the next day. The news was worse than anything the Zizzos could imagine. After an X-ray, doctors found another lump on Steven's lung.

"We were told that the chance of the lumps being related to each other was 99.99 per cent," said Ms. Zizzo.

If the lumps were related, Steven likely had a cancer called neuroblastoma -- a cancer that was always fatal in children over age five. Rushed into McMaster University's Hospital for Sick Kids, every test the doctors did confirmed the worst. The lump on Steven's neck was cancerous, which led doctors to the diagnosis of neuroblastoma.

"They handed us a death sentence for our child," said Ms. Zizzo.

But the Zizzos weren't prepared to go down without a fight. With Mr. Zizzo's medical training, he was the first to recognize that if Steven had what doctors thought, curing him would take a miracle. So the Zizzos got down on their knees and prayed, and they asked everyone they knew, of all faiths and religions to do the same.

Although they were raised Catholic, Ms. Zizzo said neither she nor her husband were particularly religious.

"We went to church, but I didn't pray regularly," said Ms. Zizzo.

"The first thing we did was thank God for the little boy we had. We didn't pray for God to heal Steven, we prayed for discrepancy in the diagnosis."

And by her account, it seems the Zizzos got what they prayed for. Despite, the odds, the lump on Steven's lung proved to be benign and therefore, unrelated to the lump on his neck.

"The medical staff told us that it was the equivalent to having won the lottery."

One-week after being admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with terminal cancer, the Zizzos took Steven home where he made a full recovery. But Ms. Zizzo doesn't attribute luck, she believes it was God, and she will look anyone in the eye and tell them the same thing.

"Some people might think we are religious wackos, but we aren't," she said. "I know it was God that saved his life."

Eighteen years later, Ms. Zizzo tells her story in a short self-published book, Ask and You Shall Receive: A Miracle for Steven.

"I feel the time was now because of shift in society," said Ms. Zizzo, referring to the trend in spirituality popularized by TV personalities like Oprah.

Told in the first person with a simplistic narrative style, Ms. Zizzo manages to keep the focus on the events and letting readers draw their own conclusions about the role of divine intervention. Ms. Zizzo said she was aware some people may or may not believe in the miracle she said they experienced.

"I wanted to share our story so that others might take away a little nugget and apply it to their own lives," she said.

Although the book is likely to resonate more strongly with people who have Christian beliefs, the story is exceptional enough to raise questions even among those of secular beliefs of a divine presence beyond the world of humans.

For those looking for an uplifting story of hope, Ask and You Shall Receive is a warm and engaging book complete with prayers, poems and inspirational sayings.