Faith Through the Journey

Cancer is completely unpredictable. Anyone who has had any connection to someone with cancer-and that’s just about everyone!-knows that. Because of the serious nature of cancer, decisions about treatment are usually made with a sense of urgency. People who never knew anything about the many varieties of cancer suddenly have to learn about them and made decisions about treatment. Sometimes there is only one option, and the radical nature of it can leave the patient and their families shell-shocked and wishing they could run away and not have to deal with it! Sometimes treatment is very successful and cancer is a thing of the past for the patient. Then there are times treatment doesn’t work; the cancer was too far advanced, the patient’s response wasn’t what the doctors hoped for, or a myriad of other complications render the treatment unsuccessful.

I think the most frustrating outcome of cancer treatment has to be success, a period of remission, and then recurrence of cancer, often in a more aggressive form and in other sites than the original cancer. You think you’ve beaten it, and it comes back. That’s probably the cruelest blow of all to a cancer patient and their family. The elation of having beaten cancer once and then the heartbreak of having your hopes dashed by its return is devastating to everyone involved. The roller coaster of emotions begins all over again and you have to-again-learn about treatment options and make quick decisions that will disrupt your life-yet again.

I am by no means an expert on cancer, nor do I understand every aspect of the disease. After having been a cancer patient now for 5 months, I do know more about it from firsthand experience. The only treatment offered to us was surgery. This is different than some forms of cancer when chemotherapy is indicated along with surgery and radiation, or chemotherapy alone, or radiation before surgery. Having been through three surgeries now, in three different sites but for the same type of cancer, I am now recovering from the most recent one on my hand. We have decided against radiation treatment, mainly because the experts were evenly split as to whether it was necessary or not. Instead, I will be closely observed and undergo follow-up scans for the next year. No method of observation is 100% accurate, as two of  my cancer sites were undetected by a PET scan because they were too small to “light up”. In addition, a “wild card” for me is Crohn’s Disease. We have yet to meet with my GI doctor, who wants me to go back on  immunosuppressant drugs to prevent a Crohn’s recurrence. Since the only risk factor I possessed for squamous cell carcinoma in the first place was a suppressed immune system, I’m reluctant to begin taking them again.

All of these moving pieces of my health care tend to be confusing and difficult to navigate. There are no guarantees in something as unpredictable as the course of physical illness, regardless of the method of treatment. As I was thinking about the question the past few days, a verse in my daily Bible reading leaped off the page at me (as God so often provides in a timely fashion!). Matthew 6:34 in The Message is translated this way: “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.” OK.  The one guarantee I DO have is that God is already in the future, and He knows MY future. That’s what He wants me to know, and I can trust Him in that.