NEWSCASTER: We take you live this morning to the Regional Cancer Center in Trenton, New Jersey, for continuing coverage of what doctors are calling a medical miracle. Donna Pickett has spent the last seven years in a vicious battle with breast cancer, becoming something of a celebrity last month when she publicly rejected modern medicine in favor of naturopathic treatment. Still unable to leave her bed in the cancer center, she brought in an alternative doctor named Guru Kuvam and began some kind of treatment with him. Last night the story took a surprising—indeed, a shocking—turn, when Donna awoke from her latest bout of cancer symptoms not only healed, but seemingly decades younger. In many ways, the sixty-year-old woman is the spitting image of her twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Melissa.
DOCTOR: I don’t know what to say. After seven years of cancer and chemotherapy Donna was a shell—she was bald, she was frail, her skin was damaged. She looked like she’d been living on the streets, or in a desert. Now … well, I don’t know what to tell you. If she hadn’t been in our hospital, connected to our machines, I wouldn’t believe this is even her. I still don’t know if I do believe it, because it’s not just the cancer: I performed her mastectomy myself, four years ago, and yet … well, look at her. They grew back. It’s like Donna disappeared and Melissa’s long-lost twin showed up, except Melissa doesn’t have a twin. That’s really Donna. I … I don’t know what to say.
MELISSA: I’m just so happy to have my mother back—just so, so, happy. It’s like she’s been given a new life, a new start. I can’t thank the Yemaya Foundation enough for giving us this incredible chance.
NEWSCASTER: The Yemaya Foundation itself, and its mysterious Guru Kuvam, may be the most interesting facet of this bizarre story. Originally a medical charity based in a crumbling Manhattan neighborhood, the Yemaya Foundation has recently turned into something of a New Age religion.
KUVAM: What you see in Donna Pickett is not merely new health but new life—literally a new body to replace her old one. Through the love of her daughter, and through her own efforts at self-healing and mind-body communion, Donna has been born again, and through her example we, too, can achieve our highest standards of human perfection. [Kuvam holds up a small plastic bottle.] This is the secret—a special lotion that is nothing less than a secular reincarnation. Through this, we have the power to shed our forms and gain new strength—new life—in each step of our immortal cycle. We must take this as a sign, a message not from gods but from our own selves, our collective consciousness, that the next step is not just for Donna but for the entire human race. Set aside the things of the past, and set your eyes not on our limits but on our potential. Today is the first day of the new human race.