God Bless This Mess(22)
The school nurse suggested I needed to see a gastrologist, and my mom made me an appointment. But he said it was IBS, too. My regular doctor reconfirmed it and suggested more changes to my diet. But I could barely go to school after that day. When I did, I’d have to stay in the nurse’s office the whole time.
Finally my mom pressed it: “No,” she said to my doctor. “There’s something else wrong. Something worse. I know there’s something wrong with my daughter.”
They finally scheduled me for an MRI so they could take a look at my whole abdominal region and see if anything showed up.
It did.
They discovered a tumor the size of an egg on my pancreas.
At eleven years old, I had an egg-size tumor in my body.
They sent me for a biopsy, and a day or so later, my dad got a call with the results—not from our regular doctor, but from an oncologist.
The tumor was malignant.
Cancer.
Pancreatic cancer—one of the deadliest forms of cancer there is.
There was good news, they said. (Or at least, that’s how my parents relayed it to me.) “They said the cancer is completely encased in the tumor,” my parents told me. “It hasn’t ruptured. Which means the cancer hasn’t spread anywhere. It’s contained. And if they get that tumor out, you’ll be fine.”
I didn’t really understand what any of that meant, and I could see in my parents’ eyes that they didn’t fully believe whatever it was. They were scared. The funny thing is, I wasn’t.
It’s so hard to explain how, but I just knew deep down that I was going to be okay.
I knew deep down that God had a plan for me, even though my purpose was still to be revealed.
Like I said, we didn’t go to church regularly as a family. We didn’t say grace over every dinner. After his sister and niece and nephew were murdered, my dad withdrew almost entirely from any sort of churchgoing or prayer. After encountering something so awful up close in his family, I think he questioned how there could even be a God who would allow such a horrible thing to happen.
I did the opposite. I started praying a lot more often, and not just at bedtime.
I didn’t talk to Jesus about what happened to my family with any kind of specifics. But I prayed for Aunt LeeLee, and for Robin and Trent, and prayed for God to protect our family from bad people. I still felt scared a lot of the time, and still had trouble sleeping, but I clearly found a lot of peace and connection to Jesus through those prayers.
On the day of my surgery, I wasn’t scared about what was going to happen to me. At all. Even though my mother was in tears and my dad looked as worried as I’d ever seen him in my life as the nurses came to wheel me into the operating room, I looked up at my mom from my hospital bed and said, “Mama, I’m going to be okay. I know Jesus has me.”
I was sure of it.
I was lying there in my pretty gown, which matched the gown worn by my new American Girl doll, Elizabeth, the one with the long blond hair who kind of looked like me; the one my parents bought me as an early Christmas present before the surgery. And I said, “Jesus has me.”
My parents were really freaking out, and I couldn’t understand it. I was just ready to get that tumor out and stop feeling bad. So in that moment, on my way into surgery, I somehow became the one who comforted my parents instead of the other way around. That’s how strong my faith was when I was eleven years old.
How powerful is that?
No matter what you believe, or how you believe it, being grounded in something that you’re absolutely sure of is powerful. Not only is it powerful for you, but it rubs off on the people around you when you share it with them, whether they believe the same way you do or not.
I was so sure that Jesus had me that the only thing I worried about all day was that I might lose my hair. There was a chance we’d have to go through radiation and chemotherapy, they said, depending on what the surgeon found once they got me into the operating room. But miraculously, I didn’t need either one.
The doctors managed to take that tumor out entirely encased. It had splenic tissue on it, which means that I might have been growing a second spleen, which is just the weirdest thing. But they were confident that no cancerous cells were left behind after the surgery.
I had to go to checkups a few times for a year or so after that, but nothing else ever turned up in my scans or in my bloodwork.
It gets even better. That year, before I got sick, was the first year I had gotten my Presidential Physical Fitness award. In part because of all the dancing I did, I was fit. I had abs. At eleven years old! And I was a little worried that I’d lose that because of the surgery; that I wouldn’t be able to do sit-ups and pull-ups the same, or might be left with a big scar on my belly, which everyone would see in my dance outfits.
But none of that happened.
My doctor, Dr. Harden, was amazing. He managed to do that whole surgery and get that tumor out through my belly button, so I wouldn’t be left with any kind of big incision scar at all. If you look closely at certain pictures of me, you can see that my belly button is kind of twisted up and there are four tiny incision marks on my stomach. He had the foresight to say to my parents, “I’m not cutting this child open all the way.”
He got the tumor out. And I was fine.
But it gets even better than that.
You never know what God has planned, and how what you’re going through might be a part of His plan.