cancer

(CHAPTER ONE) 

cancer.  a word which polite people whisper about behind guarded hands. 

that thing which wakes one from deep sleep, sweat-soaked and terror-filled. 

a diagnosis which is handed out to others, but never meant for ourselves.  

except on a sky-blue, spring day, it was given to me.  

on april 19, 2011, in a phone call,  i was handed the words breast cancer. there was no whisper and this was no dream. it was real and it was malignant and it was mine. 

i was 42.

a mother of five.

we were just home from china after adopting our daughter, bella, and this wasn't part of our plan. 

my world crashed grey, but the sky stayed blue. perhaps a promise---that april sky. there would be blue skies again. but first, we had a lot of storm clouds to make our way through. some pretty dark days.

one month after my diagnosis--may 21st--i had a bilateral mastectomy. because of incredible science and God's grace, i was able to skip out on chemotherapy with clean margins, no lymph node involvement and a low risk oncotype dx number of 15. no chemo. no radiation. thank you, Jesus. 

it has been an arduous road to recovery. hard days. sad nights. my blogposts from april to august of 2011 tell a little bit of what the first few months of cancer might look like. it tells the story. my story. God's story.  

my hope is that i have been honest. i didn't easily embrace God's plan for my health. it has been a journey of surrender. strangely enough, surrender had been the very word i was working on just before hearing news of my diagnosis. it's always been a specific struggle for me. and continues to be. 

but God is in the business of bringing beauty to the broken parts of our living. to the broken pieces of us. He redeems all things. He redeems our sinful bodies and our sick bodies. he redeems. he restores. he refines. God took the black, ugly ashes of my diagnosis and brought something beautiful. 

yes, we are praying for bluer skies ahead, but the summer of 2011 won't be easily forgotten.

i know blogs are sometimes hard to navigate when you are trying to follow a specific story. if you'd like to read my posts about cancer, i'd suggest starting with the april 20th, 2011 post, "reaching arms." 

(CHAPTER TWO)

That first chapter was over ten years ago. A decade later, my doctors gave me the "all clear." I was told I could stop my daily medication. I could forget about cancer. And in those ten years, that is exactly what I had started to do--forget about cancer. I moved on in every sense of the word. 

But shortly after that ten year mark, things began to go awry. In the fall of 2021 a random CT scan (for something unrelated) showed some strange lesions on my spine and in my pelvis. 

The doctors were stumped. The lesions read as "healed metastatic lesions." I didn't have metastatic cancer. I had no symptoms. I had less than a point three percent chance for my original breast cancer to metastasize (or spread). My first doctor told me, "go home, you're fine. this isn't metastatic cancer." A strong instinct told me to change doctors. I did so and we ran more tests and different scans. But those all came back also showing no cancer.  Fast forward a couple of months and in January of 2022 we still weren't settled with what these spots on my spine were and we decided along with my doctor that the only way to know for sure was to biopsy them. 

On February 3rd, 2022 my doctor called me to say, "Jody, I am so sorry but the biopsy shows this to be breast cancer in your spine. Your original cancer somehow metastasized. I am so very sorry." 

In a matter of days I came to realize this meant stage four, terminal cancer. We were devastated. Crushed. Filled with fear.  How? How does a woman with everything in her favor--a woman who did everything treatment-wise above and beyond--move from barely stage one all the way to terminal stage four? It was inconceivable. It was intolerable. It was a gut punch like nothing ever before.  

Since then we've come to find out my lobular type of breast cancer doesn't always read on traditional PET modalities and that's why it didn't show up last fall when they first scanned me. But biopsies don't lie and it was conclusive, hard to believe or not, I was now and will be for the rest of my life a stage four metastatic breast cancer patient. 

This is not a curable disease, but it is treatable and that is our hope. I will be in treatment for as many years as God allows me. I am 53 years old. Every year, every day will be a gift. I know we are supposed to live that way always ... But we don't really. I might have said those words in the past and had that intention, but now I have a different perspective on what the words really mean. 

Soon after this hard diagnosis, I began to find myself more convinced than ever before --- this was in God's hands. All of it. There were some things I could bring to the table. A few things which I could tweak, improve, manage better ... but ultimately, I was facing something which had to be entirely handed over to Him. He is in charge. He is the one determining my next steps. I am doing my best to just keep my eyes on Him. I have said it a 100 times since being diagnosed, my job is only to keep my eyes on Jesus. And so that is what I am doing ... or trying to do. Some days harder than others. Some days the faith feels strong, other days I waiver. I am weak.  Yes, I am weak. But He is strong. "But He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' ... That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." 2 Corinthians 12:9-10.

"teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." ~ psalm 90:12  "let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith ...so that you will not grow weary and lose heart." ~ Hebrews 12