A Spring of Joy

On Monday, I saw my ENT to follow-up on the news he gave me Friday night. It was a very lively and entertaining hour (yes, hour) in the waiting room while three 85-years old and over ladies talked loudly about how nice and handsome the doctor was, where to find deals on food in the Valley, how to prevent getting “the ebola” and how we need to be careful if we go out in public because we might get our heads cut off. The staff apologized profusely, and my wait for the doctor in the exam room was short.

Friends, the news is not good.

They have found a second area which is a 7 mm piece of tissue. It is behind the nodule they’ve been watching, and it is pressing on the laryngal nerve which would explain the vocal cord paralysis. He is concerned that this is growing tissue (because scar tissue wouldn’t act like this), and growing tissue is a huge red flag. He wants the PET scan to see if this area is hypermetabolic (meaning growing quickly), and if so, whether it is a breast or colon cancer metastasis.

Metastasis is an insanely scary word.

I asked him if it wasn’t cancer, what else it could be. He pressed his lips together and gently said he really doesn’t think it could be anything else. He hugged me and told me he was going to do everything he could to move quickly, find out what this is, and begin treating it…that he would be with me every step of the way.

I don’t know when the PET is as they are still working on insurance approval (yes, the insurance is still not approving it). After the PET, he is hoping to do a CT-guided needle biopsy of the area. The problem is the spot is right between my carotid artery and jugular vein. He will consult with the radiologist and if they decide against the needle biopsy, they will do the biopsy incisionally. Then we will go from there. (Treatment would likely be surgery and radiation.)

We are undone to put it bluntly. Terrified. And very sad.

Bri and I have just been begging God for the doctor to be wrong. (It’s not often I want my doctor to have made a mistake, that’s for sure.)

Honestly, friends, I am struggling. Not struggling with God in all of this. I know He never makes a mistake. I know He is still in control. Chaos doesn’t shake Him.

I am struggling with the exhaustion of the battle of Satan’s lies, of the depletion of my body and mind. A friend once described the gospel-less lies of the church we grew up in as a “holocaust for the soul.” I am feeling the fiery sting of that holocaust now as the accuser wants me to look to myself and my circumstances rather than the gospel for salvation, freedom and joy. I struggle to believe His love for me.

And I am scared.

We both are. My mom and dad are. My in-laws are. My friends are.

Side note: the children do NOT know at this point, so please if you see us with the children, speak cryptically. Once we know something definite, we will have that conversation with them.

I am sleeping some, but not much. We are functioning. We are still laughing. But we are also crying. I am finding the daily tasks almost monumental in my fatigue. But we are still living. Living intentionally. And we are praying.

Would you please pray with us? For us? For this to somehow miraculously all go away? And if not, for the grace and strength to walk through yet another valley in this world’s shadow of death?

I struggle to see grace, yet I know it is all around me.

And then last night, I sat around a table with four other women and we laughed and shared our hearts and ate fabulous local food and laughed some more and prayed together and cried a bit, too.

And while I was out for this much needed girls’ night, Bri and my kiddos did this.

Tonight my den will be full of middle school boys as Ash’s small group comes to Bible study together as they do every week. I love having them here. I love hearing their laughter and noise. I love teasing them and talking with them and feeding them and hearing about their lives. I love sitting upstairs and hearing the muffled hum of conversation–words I can’t hear, but I know relationship is happening.

And my big brother, who called yesterday and listened to me sob on the phone… he is pretty much amazing, and sent me this quote:

“[Jesus] bore our sin— every last drop. There was nothing partial; it was and it is the apex of one-way love. Jesus suffered the scorn, the punishment, and the wrath we deserve, and in return gives us the gift of his righteousness. It cannot be undone. Those who are lost are found, and where there was once judgment, there is now only love, extravagant and free. Where there was once guilt by association, now there is only glory by association.” (~Tullian Tchividjian, One Way Love)

Yes.

Grace surrounds me.

It has been a rainy day, and my morning started off with me getting soaked trying to get our puppy to go outside. He’s half golden retriever. Aren’t they supposed to love water?

After I got the kids and Bri off to school and work with long, tight hugs before they left, I got in the car and drove through torrential downpours to the hospital for my radioactive iodine dosing. On the interstate, I got stuck behind tractor trailers who for 10 minutes blocked both lanes because neither one would pass the other (I do not exaggerate here). I muttered about the drivers who didn’t have their lights on and the ones who tailgated me, just as trapped as I was behind the big rigs.

When I arrived at the hospital, the closest parking space was six rows back and just as I was pulling up to it, another car pulled into it. I went around and found one on the other side. As I pulled into that one, the courtesy shuttle stopped and waited. I grabbed my phone, a tissue and my purse, pulled the hood up on my raincoat and jumped out of the car just as the courtesy shuttle moved on. Seriously?! The guy waved me into my space! More than a little disgruntled, I walked to the hospital and arrived, dripping, at the radiology department.

After a few minor inconveniences, I was ushered back to the little room where the lady in gloves held my pill in a lead cup. Does anyone else find this more than mildly disturbing?

I decided to drive home a different route and skip the interstate. Not allowed to eat for two hours, but told to drink as much as I could, I stopped at a Starbucks for a white mocha with a pump of raspberry. It’s piping hot smoothness warmed me inside, and I turned up the radio. I decided the long way home was in order, and as Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, Duran Duran and Bon Jovi (yes, I know, eclectic mix) belted out tunes, I drove past the health center where I worked to put myself through college. I drove past the community college I attended, past my parents’ best friends’ home (did you hear me honk, Karen?), and past the little gas station that friends used to own and introduced me to BLT pizza (we ordered those for our youth leaders’ meetings umpteen times).

Even with the gray skies and raindrops, the fire of autumn burned all around. I marveled at the beauty of this place where I live, and at one point, as I bawled my eyes out listening to Andy Grammar sing, “We always find our way back home,” I laughed and said (or rather croaked), “I get to live here!”

I have always loved this place I call home. I love that my parents still live in the same house I grew up in, just 30 minutes away. I love that my brother and his family are 30 minutes in another direction. I have never wanted to live anywhere else.

I am married to a dreamer and a wanderer, and I have had the privilege of going places I never thought I would. He’s taught me the beauty of travel, and I’ve marveled at the Grand Canyon, London, the Pacific Ocean, Lake Powell, the Hoover Dam, and beyond. I am thankful to have seen and experienced all of these and more, but if I had never gone, I’d still be just as content.

Because I. get. to. live. here.

As I drove over swollen creeks and past pumpkin patches, as I looked at harvested fields prepped for the coming winter and mountains flaming with color, I thanked God again and again for this life.

Yes, this is hard. I am sequestered from my family–not even my puppy can be around me. But y’all, I have so much. So very, very much to be thankful for. These are all gifts.

What started out as such a hard morning has turned beautiful.

Yes, I’m stuck up in my room away from my loves. I have a headache and am very fatigued. But I am still folding their laundry, and texting back and forth with my Brian, and reading good books and blogs, and catching up on Facebook, and watching movies, and painting my fingernails, and listening to the children chatter downstairs, and smelling delicious food a friend prepared for us. Tomorrow my sweet Mama is coming up to keep me company and bringing lunch, and we’ll watch a movie together (“I’ll just sit far away from you,” she said), and she’ll help with the kiddos when they get home from school.

So many gifts, y’all.

This is what our God does.

He takes the hard and makes it beautiful.

I am so very blessed.

Thank You, Lord, that in the bitterness of suffering and the impatience of waiting, I breathe the sweet breath of Paradise with which You fill my days. Only You can give the eyes to see beyond the muck and mire. Only You can fill each breath with sweetness, for if I breathe in my own strength, I only smell and feel the curse. My days are already written in Your book, and my life is in Your hands. Only You can give me life to live, breath to breathe. Thank You for this life. Each moment of it. Even this hard. You have shown me Your beauty.

“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

It was one of those nights last night, where I tossed and turned and I had to constantly remind myself that God knew each toss and turn–that He was keeping count of my tears. It has been a rough couple of days, compounded by the fact that I was on such a “high” of relief from my blood test results last week. That “high” crashed and burned yesterday.

Following up on the coughing and the hoarseness I have been struggling with the past five months, I had my throat scoped yesterday. Yes, it’s pretty much as delightful as it sounds. Turns out this isn’t stomach or acid related at all…

My left vocal cord is paralyzed.

Yes. Paralyzed.

“I don’t want to be an alarmist,” my ENT said kindly (and he was so very kind), “But the first place we have to go is cancer.” There could be a tumor pressing on the nerve to my vocal cord (thyroid, throat or lung). It was at that point that I kinda forgot to breathe.

Sometime in the next week or so I will have a full body PET and CT scan of my neck and chest. They haven’t called me yet with the date.

All that being said, my ENT also told me that there are plenty of cases where it’s not cancer and it’s something else, and sometimes they are never able to figure out what caused it. The fact that my PET in January and my CT in April were clear is a good sign; however, he said, “You weren’t hoarse like this then, so we have to check.”

Honestly, y’all, I don’t think I have cancer again. I really don’t.

It’s the fact that my vocal cord is paralyzed, and it could be permanent.

There are things they can do–send me to vocal therapy, inject collagen into the vocal cord to thicken it so that it will work with the other vocal cord, and there’s another type of surgery that still confuses me how it works. But even with all these things, sometimes, the hoarseness never goes away.

I tossed and turned a lot last night. I struggled to believe everything I’ve ever written here. I wrestled. I wept.

Then the quietness came.

This morning I spoke with a friend who’s facing her own cancer battle. We talked about how the psalms are full of struggling with God, of how fear is real, of we have a God we can go to with our fears. We talked of Gideon’s battle against the Midianites and we talked about the faithfulness of God. We talked of wrestling with God and how it’s not wrong to wrestle–that God wants us to come to Him with His struggles, and that He is faithful to help us in those struggles.

I have cried over the fears of what this could mean… I have ached to sing over my daughter each night like I used to, to harmonize with Micah, to belt it out with Asher at church, to turn up the car radio and sing loudly, to sit with my Bri and his guitar and sing, our voices blending up and in and over each other’s seamlessly. What if I never get to do any of these again?

In November I stood with my Brian before our congregation, and we sang,

Though you slay me
Yet I will praise you
Though you take from me
I will bless your name
Though you ruin me
Still I will worship
Sing a song to the one who’s all I need
(~Shane and Shane)

What if I can never sing again?

Is God still worthy of my praise?

The answer?

A resounding yes.

He is the ONE who is all I need.

And one day, whether it be next week, next month, next year, or in eternity, He will put a new song in my mouth…

My heart and flesh are failing these days. It is hard to reconcile what this could all mean… the what if’s.

But I can’t go there… I cannot dwell on or sit in “What if…?”

I do; however, know what is.

He is.

His truth, His Word, stands unchanged. And “these are written so you may believe and that you may have life in His name.” My life is in His name, not in my voice.

John Piper says, “Therefore, therefore, do not lose heart. But take these truths and day by day focus on them. Preach them to yourself every morning. Get alone with God and preach his word into your mind until your heart sings with confidence that you are new and cared for.”

I will wrestle with this a lot, of that I have no doubt. I will have good days and bad days. I will struggle with fear, despair, exhaustion, trust and faith. I am so very weak, y’all. But He is my strength, and He will show Himself to me, of that I have no doubt.

And I know that if my voice never sings again… my heart still can and will.

It has been weeks since I’ve written and weeks of waiting and waiting and waiting to determine just what exactly is going on with my thyroid. Since April, my cancer markers have been elevated, and I have ultrasounds that show possible evidence of cancer but with no growth. It could just be calcification from previous treatments. I’ve been sitting in limbo as doctors have called each other and consulted with radiologists and labs, and I have struggled with less than stellar communication from them. It has been hard and frustrating to say the least.

Last week, after waiting for a month to hear the results of my last lab work, I called the doctor. Neither she nor her nurse were in that day, so I had to wait the weekend to call back. However, the front desk receptionist did read me the notes that were in my file which said they had called me two weeks earlier and given me the news.

Only they didn’t.

Bri and I both looked through our phones logs… no missed calls, no voicemails, no nothing. And trust me, if I had talked to a nurse two weeks ago about whether I have cancer again or not, I’d have remembered.

I called again this week.

The nurse finally called me back.

She never apologized or acknowledged the mixup on the phone call. I mentioned it and explained that twice I have had to call them and let them know they’ve left messages on my phone for a different Angela than me. Perhaps y’all have our numbers mixed up in the system? Her response was to re-read that she had spoken to me on August 26th. I just sighed and let it pass, because well, I’m pretty much tired of fighting at this point.

Soooo… now the short story is. Cancer markers are ZERO! No evidence, no need for a scan or biopsy. I’ll have an ultrasound again in 3 months to see if there’s growth on the spot they’re watching.

My antibodies are elevated though, and when I asked the nurse about that, she had no answer and offered to make an appointment for me to ask the doctor. To which I asked if I could just speak to the doctor about it since it’s one quick question. No. They don’t do that. To which I told her I wasn’t interested in driving an hour to talk to my doctor for 5 minutes and pay for it. I’ll ask her when I see her at my regularly scheduled appointment in October.

Needless to say, I’m becoming more and more disenchanted with this particular doctor and hospital and system. *sigh*

But…

I don’t have cancer again!

So I’m okay with the headaches it’s causing. Errr… or mostly okay with it.

These past months have been really hard, and I’ve had to fight the ongoing temptation to just bury myself in myself and hole up–something the introvert in me would love to do. See, if I go to God with this struggle, then I have to wrestle, and I’m so tired of the constant battle that I would rather ignore the fight than fight the fight.

I forget far too often that He is with me. He has already won the fight. He is for me. He has Satan on a leash (as our pastor loves to say, “Leviathan is on a leash!” Words I need to be reminded of constantly.)

I forget that this life is a long story, and I wasn’t promised a painless life. I am promised a story that ends well–eternity with Him.

But even more than that… I am promised HIM–here, now, every day walking with me, carrying me, praying for me, loving me, grieving with me, and giving me the grace and strength to move forward in the struggle.

I have my share of stories to tell. Yes, there are lots of hard ones, but so many more good ones.

And the ending.

Oh, y’all, the ending is more than one that ends well… it’s an ending that’s beyond description!

(Thank all y’all so much for your prayers, for waiting with me, for your encouragements along the way. This. This is why community is so very, very important. We all need each other. You bless me.)