Audrey Toguchi was a seventy-four-year-old retired elementary-school teacher of Aiea, Oahu, a lifelong Catholic of Okinawan descent and a longtime devotee of Damien of Molokai. In 1997 a malignant lump was excised from her thigh; the pathology showed liposarcoma, a rare and aggressive soft-tissue cancer. In April 1999, follow-up scans showed the cancer had returned and metastasized to her lung — three tumors, the largest already two and a half centimeters across, in a region too dispersed for surgery. Her oncologist, Dr. Walter Y.M. Chang of Honolulu (himself not Catholic), told her chemotherapy was unlikely to extend her life beyond months. She refused chemotherapy.
Audrey flew to Molokai, descended the two-thousand-foot Pali cliffs to Kalaupapa, and prayed at Damien's original grave by St. Philomena Church. She returned to Oahu and continued her ordinary life — gardening, attending Mass, sleeping in her own bed. Her family invoked Damien in daily prayer.
Subsequent CT scans showed the lung tumors shrinking. By March 2000, less than a year later, the largest tumor had disappeared entirely; the others followed. Dr. Chang, who had monitored her case with increasing astonishment, told the diocesan inquiry: 'I have to say that this is a miracle. It cannot be explained by science.'
The Vatican Medical Consulta — a board of largely non-Catholic specialists in oncology — reviewed her case in 2008 and accepted unanimously that the spontaneous and complete remission of metastatic liposarcoma could not be explained by medicine. Pope Benedict XVI accepted the case as the miracle required for Damien's 2009 canonization. Audrey Toguchi attended the canonization Mass in St. Peter's Square. She died of natural causes in 2014 at age eighty-eight — fifteen years after she had been declared terminal.