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Charlotte Purcell heaved the bags of groceries into her arms and set off home. She was already thinking of how many meals she could eke from the food she’d bought. Times were tough, and everybody was tightening their belts.

The newspapers were full of more bad news in that February of 1934: the country was experiencing the worst-ever drought in its history. For Charlotte and Al, who now had three kids to feed, it was a precarious situation. Charlotte paused on her way home to rest, rubbing cautiously at her left arm. It had begun to bother her last year, but now there was a continuous achy pain. “The local doctors told her to use hot towels,”1 recalled her husband, Al.

Hot towels, however, had had zero effect. Charlotte concentrated on her fingertips, running them gently over her arm. Yes, she thought, it was definitely bigger. She peered closely at the little swelling nestled in the crook of her elbow. It was just a little bump, but it seemed to her it was growing larger. She would show it to Al later, she thought, see what he had to say.

Suddenly, Charlotte cried out in pain. The bag in her left arm dropped fast to the floor, spewing groceries onto the sidewalk. She had felt a “sharp, knife-like pain which went through the elbow.”2 She bit her lip, rubbing again at where the pain was, and then bent to clear up her shopping. This was happening more and more frequently; when holding something it would drop out of her hands. It was the last thing she needed. The kids were four, three, and a year and a half old. She needed to get well.

Maybe prayer would help. That Sunday, she slid into her pew at St. Columba with her usual piousness and bent her head to pray. There was a bit of a commotion further ahead, and Charlotte glanced up to see Catherine struggling; at that time, her friend’s legs had been stiffening so she had trouble kneeling in church. Catherine could barely bend her legs on the solid wooden plank in the pews. Tom had his arms around her, trying to help her; he looked alarmed at his wife’s condition.

In fact, Tom found himself “in a frenzy of anxiety.”3 Catherine was still just about able to kneel and get around, but some days it was a close-run thing. She kept saying that they didn’t have the money to get better medical care, but Tom now decided something had to be done. Catherine owned their house outright, after all. They could always mortgage it; that would free up some cash for doctors’ bills.

Tom helped his wife slowly back to her feet. She was panting from the effort, blowing out little pained breaths as she tried to force her limbs to straighten. Yes, this had gone on too long. If the doctors in Ottawa wouldn’t help, Tom was determined to find somebody who would.

He went to Chicago, the nearest city. It was eight-five miles away, but Tom traveled eight-five miles there and eight-five miles back—and he brought a doctor back with him: Charles Loffler. A “reputable medical man”4 and blood specialist, Loffler was kindly-looking with sticky-out ears. He first saw Catherine at the Ottawa office where she worked on March 10, 1934. Despite his experience, he was initially flummoxed by her symptoms but adamant he would learn the cause. He took a blood specimen and, on testing it in Chicago, noticed “a toxic quality in her blood.”5

The following Saturday, he returned to Ottawa—and found Catherine had declined significantly in the intervening week. She became so ill that just at the time her doctors’ bills soared—Loffler’s invoice, by the end of it, would be for some $605 ($10,701)—she was forced to leave work. Loffler did what he could to alleviate her anemia and increasing pain, while he continued to hunt for a diagnosis.

The lump in Charlotte Purcell’s elbow, meanwhile, had now swollen to the size of a golf ball. She had “terrible pain”6 all down her arm; it was worse at night, when she’d lie awake, scared and confused. She and Al also went to Chicago, like their neighbor Tom Donohue, but found “fifteen Chicago specialists were puzzled by her case.”7

Catherine told her friend about Dr. Loffler, so the next time he was in Ottawa, Charlotte also went to him for treatment—and it seems she persuaded many of her former colleagues to do the same. “She got them together,” remarked a relative. “She was kind of pushy about it.”8 The girls had been a clique at work, and those who were left alive had not forgotten the bonds of their sisterhood. In the end, Loffler hosted several informal clinics for the women at a local hotel.

Helen Munch attended, no longer married because, she said, her husband had divorced her because of her illness. She confessed her legs felt “hollow…as if air was rushing through.”9 Though she was a woman who “wanted to be going all the time,”10 she said miserably, “Now I have to be quiet, still. I never wanted to be quiet.”11

Olive West Witt, a dark-haired motherly woman, was distraught. “I’ll tell you how I feel,” she said. “I’m just thirty-six, but I live like an old woman of seventy-five.”12 Inez Vallat also hobbled to the hotel; since last February one side of her face had drained constantly with pus, while her hips were now so locked that she was almost at the point that “she could move neither backward nor forward.”13 Marie Rossiter told the doctor how she “would love to dance, but I can’t because of my ankles and the bones of my legs.”14 Charlotte persuaded the Glacinski sisters, Frances and Marguerite, to come too. “Charlotte never felt sorry for herself,” said a relative. “She would just take over and take care of [everyone].”15

Though Loffler traveled to Ottawa every weekend throughout March and into April 1934, he was still not ready to present a diagnosis. Come April 10, Charlotte could wait no longer. The growing mass in her arm was excruciating. “We finally took her to Chicago to Dr. Marshall Davison,”16 her husband, Al, remembered.

It was there, at the Cook County Hospital, that Dr. Davison presented Charlotte with a choice. In order to live, he told her, there was only one option. He would have to amputate her arm.

Charlotte was twenty-eight years old; she had three children under five. Yet what choice did she have? She chose life.

They cut off her arm at the shoulder. “There was no way,” a relative later said, “that they could use a prosthetic arm or a hook because they had nothing to attach it to.”17 It was gone. Her limb, which had always been there, scratching her nose, carrying shopping, holding a watch dial, was gone. The doctors were mystified by the arm itself. With all the grim fascination of medics, after the operation they kept it in formaldehyde because it was so odd.

For the Purcells, there was simply a strange relief. “Dr. Davison says we’re lucky to have her still with us,”18 Al Purcell said quietly.

But his wife had been left “helpless.”19 Before the operation, she had slid from her left hand, for the last time, her wedding ring. Now, she wore it on her right hand, and asked Al to safety-pin her left sleeve to cover up the missing limb. “My husband,” she later said, “is my hands.”20

Charlotte and Al only hoped that such a huge sacrifice would be enough. But already it didn’t help with one thing: “She still feels,” Al remarked, “the terrible pain of the hand and arm they removed.”21 The ghost girl had phantom pains from the limb that was no longer there.

“There is some possibility,” Al added, “of recurrence on the right side. We’re not sure yet.”22

Only time would tell.