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Especially now, we long to know that the broken things will be made whole again. But I’m starting to think that the lesson of this season isn’t about avoiding everything painful and broken, but walking with both gratitude and grief hand in hand. Knowing God turns everything upside down. When I ache in grief, I am somehow that much more grateful for who he is. In the moments where I have felt most broken, most desperate, he sees. He knows. He cares. He’s never given me cliches to stuff my grief, make it less intrusive. He makes room for it, welcoming it into the weaving of my story of need and hope. The thread makes it beautiful as it shapes who I am and who I am becoming. The lie of comfort as the goal becomes less and less appealing, I’m learning that pain means I’m beautifully human.
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.
I don’t know if Isaac had cancer this time last year. Sometimes I wish I knew, but mostly I long for the naivety that last fall brought. In January, we met his oncologist for the first time and she beckoned us to believe that this is a very treatable cancer. Her kind eyes made me want to believe, but I quickly learned that once cancer becomes a regular part of your vocabulary, treatable is not synonymous with easy. She told me that for much of treatment, we will be able to go about life as normal. Picture soccer games, vacations, a hair-covered-head back-to-school. However, for so many reasons, normal is something we left behind around December 17 of last year when we first noticed that mass on Isaac’s neck. We will never pick up that normal life again.
So, during the month, I will write about diagnosis, about childhood leukemia, about anxiety and God. About fear, about hope, about chemo and cancer in a pandemic. For some reason, it feels a bit scary, nerve-wracking to first of all, put words to all of this and second of all, to challenge myself to share it with others. But it also feels like obedience. It feels like healing. It feels like remembering that God has had us all along. I don’t know what’s going to come out, but I hope that through this, you feel welcomed into our story.
It’s hard to see your kid go through all of this. And I don’t even know the half of it yet. But it’s not hard to be here by his side for it all. He’s still the same amazing boy he always was. Loving him through this is the easiest part and it’s my joy. I’d do anything if it meant seeing him conquer this thing and get better. I have no doubt he will.
In his bath tonight, Isaac asked, "Did God give me cancer?"
"Hmmm." I said, "What do you think?"
"No," he said, "I think God is who is keeping my heart beating."
I can't think of a more important truth.
Breaking down seems to come in waves. In hospital bathrooms. PET scan rooms. Early morning hours when I wake up and remember the road before us. Sometimes I’m not sure that the fog lifting is helpful at all. I have a lot of fear surrounding the path of chemo. But I can surrender and breathe... or worry and go down that hole of chaos in my mind. I waffle between both.
But God has gone before us so far, and he won’t leave us. He is so so kind, my friends.
Cancer.
Isaac is tucked into my bed right now after this whirlwind of a day. There are still many questions and I think I am largely running on adrenaline and faith. Somehow, I am still raising a hallelujah in the middle of this storm. Right now, this diagnosis brings a calm where there once felt chaotic unknown. And it lays a path in front of us that lifts the fog a tiny bit.
The doctor called during lunch. Not expecting any results yet, I answered expecting him to just ask how he did. But quickly, I learned that we do have results and they are not favorable. Suspicious is the word they used. I also quickly learned that when it comes to making appointments with pediatric oncologists, they just call and tell you when to be there. And life suddenly has to revolve and fit around the people who we’re entrusting to make our child well.
And after a few moments of sharing our journey, the elders gathered around our family, laid hands on Isaac, and we begged God for life healed and whole for our boy. Jesus' ministry and the first church is filled with stories of people being healed, and I imagined the cancerous cells in his body melting, healthy blood filling his veins. I half hoped that we would be surprised at the results of his tests the following week. I hoped that we would be able to declare him healed in Jesus name without any need for chemo.
In the moment, I believed this was a key moment in his healing. At the same time it felt like just a drop in a bucket of hope. Would this work? Would God heal him? And now, a year and a half later, how much can I trust that Isaac will stay in remission?