It was the day before Christmas when we went for the ultrasound. The whole drive there, I reassured Isaac in the back seat, “Remember? You’ve had an ultrasound before. They’re just taking a look at your lymph node and then it will be over. It was fine last time we looked.”
My husband would be quick to recall, despite my reassurances, I did not feel so calm about that ultrasound appointment. Ever since that day when he looked to the left to reveal that mass in his neck, I had some sort of radar blaring all sirens. Something wasn’t right. Cancer or not, something isn’t right with my baby.
We celebrated Christmas, all the while trying to push the whole idea out of my head. With every tilt of his head, I would steal a glance at his neck, begging for the lump to look smaller, or perhaps, just disappear altogether. My longings never became truth and the day of celebrating was a dense fog for me. However, I watched as our kids delighted in the festivities and whispered a prayer of thanks for the way a child can be so intensely present in each moment, without worriment and rumination taunting them.
On the twenty-sixth, we had plans to drive up north to visit Jordan’s side of the family to celebrate. We piled the family and the dog into the Odyssey and had just pulled onto the highway when I got a call from the pediatrician. Something about the ultrasound is abnormal. They want to do a biopsy. Expect a call to schedule that. *click* Abnormal. Abnormal isn’t good. Against my better judgment and the advice of every friend and counselor I’ve ever had, I spent the car ride flipping between Isaac’s ultrasound report and google. Words like multi-lobular and conglomerate were used to describe the lymph node, and nearly everything I read associated that with malignancy. To be fair, I also know Dr.Google can associate headaches or a bad knee with cancer if you go digging enough. But this piece of information wrecked me, and I had to get through the next few days with family somehow holding it together. I had enough information to feel wrecked, and not yet enough to know what was going on. To this day, that weekend remains one of the most intensely difficult of this whole experience. The fear, the waiting, was eating me alive.
Panic attacks swallowed me whole that first night at my in-laws. One right after the other, my chest was so tight I physically ached. I took the advice of my counselor and got out of bed. Staying in bed while not sleeping rarely actually leads to more sleep, surprisingly enough. I scoured the book case for something familiar and easy to get my mind off of my sick boy. As I settled down to read, I ended up setting the book on the table beside me and just sobbing. Alone, in the quiet dark, I finally had a moment to have it out with God. I sobbed like a child who wails until the last of their breath exits their lungs, and a mother has to gently remind them that they need to breathe. Between gasps, I wailed. Why? Please don’t make us walk this road. I don’t want to walk this road. Please don’t make us.
The next day, I sent a text to my dearest friends that said this.
I don’t remember if I was dreaming or praying, but last night I was experiencing putting all my fears and even Isaac in Jesus hands. And I had this sense of his asking me, “will you also let me hold your heart?” Like this burning anxiety in the center of my chest is a heart so broken that I feel like I literally can’t hold onto it anymore. And Jesus was asking me if he could hold it for me so I don’t have to try and function with a broken heart. This morning, the tears are still here, but that burning crawl-out-of-my-skin anxiety is not.
Perhaps that is when I realized that God was not actually going to take this cup from us. He was, however, going to walk it with us. He was holding us, weeping with us, assuring us that he sees, loves, and counts our tears. He was writing this story, and I could either trust that he is good and that he sees every part of it front and back, or I could try to manage all of my pain and fears on my own. What I learned, was why God says, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who are at the end of their rope, those who feel they’ve lost what is most dear to them. Only then will you experience his embrace. And sometimes, we’re still sobbing in that embrace.