A Long Week

If you want to start at the beginning, here's Part 1.

This week was tough. Tough in a couple of ways. Not as tough as it is for some people, but still tough.

Tuesday, as you'll already know if you've read my previous post, I went in for my first round of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is well known for triggering a wide array of possible side effects, in a puzzlingly random fashion. A good oncologist will tell you that these are the possible side effects, we have no way to determine which ones will actually happen in your specific body with your specific cancer, but here's what to do if they do. From my previous post you know that I had zero side effects when I was in the chair for seven hours getting my infusion (praise God - that's an amazing blessing right there!) but when I got home I started to experience an uncomfortable side effect known as first bite syndrome, or FBS. To briefly recap what that is, picture in your mind the worst muscle cramp you've ever had. Now imagine that every time you take the first bite of pretty much anything, you get that cramp simultaneously in both hinges of your jaw, and it lasts maybe 10-15 seconds before it subsides and you can eat normally. It can be excruciating, and it's pretty frustrating to have to deal with it after all of my talk about faith for healing! Typically FBS subsides over time as the meds work their way out of your system, but basically I've dealt with it all week since then. I continue to speak out that the pain doesn't belong to me, Jesus took it and it has to leave my body! But it hung around anyway.

Then there was Tuesday night, when, probably due to the steroids they gave me, at about 2am I was suddenly wide awake for about three hours. Taking in all of that medication at once tends to wear a patient out a bit anyway, and being low on sleep certainly didn't help over the next few days. Keep in mind, Monday I had an 8:15am appointment with the nurse practitioner, then Tuesday my arrival time at the treatment center for infusion was 7am. So I was behind the eight ball a little bit on sleep even before my 3-hour unwanted wake-up; I tried to take it as easy as I could and go to bed as early as possible, but I struggled with fatigue all week.

Then there was the low-level queasiness that's been my companion most of the week. I have some anti-nausea medicine, but it seemed like overkill when I wasn't throwing up or anything - I did eventually try it out one day, and it seemed to do more damage than help, so I laid off for the rest of the week.

It also didn't help that I had some kind of medical appointment every day - four at the cancer treatment center and one at a hospital for a heart echo (everything looked good). By Friday I was absolutely sick and tired of driving up to the cancer center!

I'm saying all of this not to complain, and not to elicit sympathy, and certainly not to paint a picture that somehow I have flawless faith that took away every moment of discomfort. I think it's honest to share that some things, despite a ton of prayer of faith from dozens of people I do and don't know, still haven't gone how I would have mapped them out if I was writing the script. I did not feel full of faith every day when my tummy was complaining that it was hungry and upset, and my jaws were complaining that they didn't want to chew anyway, and my body was complaining that it just wanted to go back to bed please. But in those moments when I didn't feel like being super faith man, I held on to my belief that God wants me well and that's where I'm headed. And, on the positive side, ever since we started having people pray for me and then especially this week after one chemo treatment, my initial symptom of having difficulty swallowing seems to be getting a LOT better. I don't have medical documentation that there has been a significant change, but it seems like it to me!

The other day I told a friend of mine: "Sometimes you 'believe' in healing, and other times you darn well better REALLY believe in healing!" All faith is is making the decision that you are going to follow what the Word of God says, no matter what. Either it's true or it's not. Faith is when you quit riding the fence and jump off on the God side.

Today I was still able (with permission from the oncologist) to volunteer with my wife as a Sunday school teacher for preschoolers at church. We love those kids with all of our hearts, and I don't want to miss out on having the chance to spend time with them and share Jesus with them. It was an amazing victory to have the energy to do that! God is absolutely doing some incredible things in my body!

It's A Long Story.... Part 5

 If you want to start at the beginning, here's Part 1.

This will be the last blog post titled "It's A Long Story"... it seems like "It's A Long Story... Part 37" might get a little uninspiring! I'll keep periodically blogging when anything interesting happens, but with this post we're caught up to the current situation.

Tuesday I went into the cancer treatment center for my first round of chemotherapy (the oncologist tells us he plans to do at least four treatments, then re-evaluate, and then likely he will recommend four more). This was to be a 7 hour treatment, which is a LOT longer than my wife's treatments three years ago (hers were about 4 hours each). They had prepared us ahead of time by providing us with a HUGE list of every possible side effect known to man. We've been praying and believing God for healing already, and I felt like I wanted to kick it up a lot and apply some more faith to the situation. In the waiting room I posted on Facebook "First chemo infusion today! We are being bold and asking God for ZERO side effects!" I knew our believing friends would add their faith to ours! My wife and I also prayed together and asked God for NO side effects.

I got hooked up to the chemo, and guess how many side effects I experienced? None at all! All day we were paying attention to make sure our nurse knew if anything started to go sideways, but the worst thing that happened all day was being bored sitting around with no drama at all!

Since I got home I've experienced one side effect that we were told about. The nurse called it "first bite syndrome" and that's literally what it is... when I took the first bite of a meal or snack, I started to get a pain at the hinges of my jaw like an electric shock. Since we knew that it's not anything unusual or even serious, I just put up with if the first couple of times I ate, but then I realized, you know what? I don't have to put up with this! Jesus took this pain for me! So now whenever it happens I'm speaking out: "I am NOT putting up with this! This is not my pain! Jesus paid the price for this!"

One of the first words that came to me when we first got the cancer diagnosis was that Jesus took my sickness to Hell when He died on the cross, and He DID NOT bring it back. When I experience sickness or pain, that is a direct frontal attack on the truth of God's Word. It's easy when you know something isn't medically serious to just ignore it and move on with your day, but I don't intend to get complacent. The story is that FBS will subside anyway over the days after treatment, but I'm not waiting. I'm going to fight it with the Word of God! It needs to go away immediately!

Here's my Cancer Destruction In Progress shirt, if you want to buy one!

More to come...

It's a Long Story... Part 4

If you want to start at the beginning, here's Part 1.

The next two weeks felt like a constant stream of appointments and tests. We met with the oncologist to find out what he wanted to do next. We went to "chemo class" where the basically tell you all of the unpleasant side effects that can happen as a result of chemotherapy and what to do if they did happen (useful information, but also unsettling information!)  I got a PET scan, which as it turns out confirmed that all of the areas that the CT scan indicated as possible areas of concern were, in fact, areas of concern. We talked to a nurse at the hospital about a biopsy of my adrenals that the oncologist had ordered. And, least anticipated of all by me, Port Install.

A port is a small device that is implanted just underneath your skin, with a short length of hose that connects directly to a vein. The port is then used for blood draws, and also to add the medicine into your bloodstream, without having to stick you in the arm every time. It saves you from damaging your veins from getting pokes many times a week. Getting one put in these days is an outpatient surgery - you're in for a few hours, then you go home with instructions not to lift anything heavy for two days. It was easy peasy, and less than a week later at the cancer center they were able to use it for a blood draw... and I got to see how much easier it is to use a port for that then the arm stick. I keep telling myself that I am now a cool cyborg - I haven't convinced myself quite yet, but I'm getting there!

I also got an MRI scan. The three different scans I've gotten serve different purposes and use different technology. For a CT scan there is the metal donut I talked about here. A CT scan is basically a 3-D x-ray. For PET scans and MRIs you are inside of a metal tube for a period of time (I figured out really quick that I should just keep my eyes closed and then I didn't risk claustrophobia!), but a PET scan is sort of a reverse x-ray, where they put some radioactive stuff inside of you and the scan detects it (think of the CT as shining a light on something, and the PET scan as the thing itself glowing). An MRI uses magnets (and loud noises?) to create a picture of your insides. I'm not going to try to explain what the three do differently - you can Google that and get a better idea than I could explain, because I don't understand it myself - but suffice it to say, for a while it felt like we were constantly either on the way to somewhere, coming back from somewhere, talking to a nurse about a test, or actually getting the test!

During this time, something came to me that hadn't occurred to me before, and I believe it was the Holy Spirit. I started to think, and now I believe for sure, that God is giving me the opportunity to be present at the cancer treatment center for a while specifically to bring His joy and hope to people who need it. There are people there who feel very sick and very exhausted. Maybe their cancer is further advanced than mine. Maybe their body doesn't do well with chemo - for some people every infusion puts them on their back for days. Bot God has given me hope in my heart, and I believer he wants me to share it! I've had people tell me that they are amazed, encouraged, and inspored by my attitude and faith. I wanted to bring that with me to the cancer treatment center!

Over the past decade or so, I've developed a little bit of a reputation for wearing silly T-shirts. I think of it as a minor superpower of mine. I decided that I might not be able to speak to everyone at the cancer center, but I sure could use my T-shirt powers to bring people joy! So I bought a flaming red shirt that says LEAN MEAN CANCER FIGHTING MACHINE in huge letters that are pretty impossible not to want to read, and wore it the next time I went to the cancer center.

Before we even got inside, a man shouted out "I LOVE THAT!" A little while later, I passed a lady in the hallway, and she said "I need that shirt!" My wife and I watched a bunch more people read it and smile, and a few more commented on it. My plan is to continue to pick up new shirts over time - it turns out there is a whole genre of funny "cancer sucks" T-shirt designs to choose from. Those are just to get the conversation going, though. I have bigger plans, and you may think I'm crazy, but because of this I'm kind of looking forward to my first chemo day.

I went with my wife to every chemo infusion she had to go through those 4-5 years ago, and as usual at a medical appointment, you wind up sitting around in a room full of people. That waiting room is full of people who are about to get unpleasant chemicals pumped into their body, and they all know it. My plan is to walk around the waiting room while I'm waiting (in my funny T-shirt!), find out who is getting a treatment that day, and to tell them "You're strong! You can handle this!" and whatever else the Spirit might have me say. My goal is to inject joy and hope into the situation rather than to try to notch my "converts" belt. My goal is to give to people, not to attack them.. I'll let you know tomorrow how it went!

Here's my Lean Mean Cancer Fighting Machine shirt, if you want to buy one! (It doesn't have to be red!)

 

Continued in Part 5...

Should I Take Medicine?

In yesterday's post I promised I would explain this statement: "We don't believe in ignoring a health problem just because you prayed about it." There are people out there that believe that accepting medical assistance when you have prayed for healing indicates a lack of faith in God. We don't feel that way, and I'll tell you exactly why.

Not every healing happens via an instantaneous miracle. In Mark 16:18 Jesus said that whoever believes in Him "...will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover." Recovery from sickness is not always instant. (See yesterday's post for more on this.)

But I also don't think that every "they will recover" has to happen without medical help. I think every healing comes from God, whether you take medicine or not, because of the simple fact that doctors cannot heal people. Medicine does not heal you, and any honest doctor will tell you the same.

Let's step back for a second and think about something very simple: a paper cut. When you get a paper cut, you probably don't even wash it and put a bandage on it unless it's a pretty serious paper cut that is bleeding (does that even happen?) You don't take any medicine, and yet it heals anyway. That's because God made our bodies so that they can repair themselves given the right circumstances. That healing is very much part of the natural world, but it absolutely comes from God because He placed that mechanism in your body.

Let's say you get a deeper cut. It's bleeding, but it doesn't require going to the hospital. You wash it, put some ointment on it, and put a bandage on top of that. In a few days it is healed up completely, and probably you can't even tell that a cut ever happened. Did the ointment heal the cut? No, it did not. It mostly kept it from getting infected, but it didn't instantly knit the cells back together. Your body contains platelets, white blood cells, and other mechanisms that work together to close up the skin. The medicine didn't heal you; your body healed itself, and that healing comes from God.

When the nurse practitioner was explaining to me the various medicines that are going into my chemotherapy cocktail, she told us that one of them simply reveals the cancer cells to other cells. The way I understand it, some cancer cells can disguise themselves in such a way that the white blood cells that would normally attack and destroy those mutated cells don't see them as abnormal. This particular chemo medicine flags those cells as abnormal so the white blood cells that are already there will attack and destroy them. Once again, the healing mechanism is already present in my body; the medicine will just assist the healing process that God already created in defending my body against the invasion.

Every medicine is there for one or both of two reasons: to assist your body in healing itself, or to make you more comfortable so your body can heal itself (painkillers, anesthesia, etc.) Even the very best medicines that science has discovered cannot actually heal you. Healing always comes from God. And that's why I don't have any problem believing God for recovery while simultaneously taking advantage of the medicines that God placed in the world and allowed super smart people to discover that can also help us. They won't heal me: God will heal me.

Please, if you become very sick, pray and believe God for your healing. I hope these blog posts help you with that. But if the Holy Spirit does not specifically speak to your heart that you should not take any medicine, please prayerfully consider what modern medicine has to offer. You're not going to Hell for taking an aspirin, or getting a flu shot, or taking chemo, and you don't somehow invalidate your faith and forfeit your healing by doing those things. In fact, when this blog post goes live a few days after I wrote it, I expect to already be sitting in a chair taking my first chemo infusion, and I'll be thanking God the whole time for the skilled and caring medical staff that is treating me.

Tomorrow I'll get back to the Long Story!

It's a Long Story... Part 3.

If you want to start at the beginning, here's Part 1.

The next day was Sunday. My wife and I volunteer every other week teaching a preschooler class, and I wanted to let our children's pastor and her assistant know what was going on. We got prayed for by the whole team of children's volunteers, and as a bonus, the assistant gave me what turned out to be really great advice. "Christ the Healer by F. F. Bosworth is on YouTube for free, the whole thing," she told us. "Google it up and listen to it!" I did Google it up, but here it is so you don't have to:

I grew up in churches that believe that God still heals people today, and much of what is in this 100+ year old book was familiar territory... in fact, there was a copy of it in my house when I was a teenager! But if I ever read it, I didn't read it with my mind open to what it was actually saying, rather than what I expected it to say. There were no Scriptures in the book that I hadn't heard, but there were some concepts that I don't remember ever being part of messages about healing when I was a kid (or an adult). For example:

• The Bible never says that every ailment will be healed instantly by a miracle. It says that you should lay hands on the sick, and they will recover. Have you ever been in "recovery" after a hospital procedure? I have... it doesn't happen instantaneously. Usually it takes days to fully recover. There are miracles that are instant, definitely, but there is also a slow steady recovery. Bosworth tells this funny story about promising a child you will buy her some new clothes: "Suppose again, that after you promise her the new dress, she runs to the mirror to see if she looks any more 'dressed up.' She then says: 'I cannot see any difference; I do not look a bit better'; and then gives up the idea of having a new dress." Just because you might not see the answer in an immediate miracle doesn't mean it doesn't belong to you!
  
  
• Healing for your body is exactly as much a promise from God as salvation of your soul. Romans 8:11 says "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you." In Psalm 103:2-3 it says "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases..." Forgiveness of iniquity is placed on the same footing here with healing of diseases. It's one of the benefits of putting your faith in God! (I've blogged about this before... check it out here.)
  
  
• Symptoms and diagnoses exist. They are not imaginary, and it's not faith to pretend they are not there. When a doctor, who is a scientist, tells you what he observes in your body, there is no reason to think he is being dishonest with you. However, those real things that exist are the actual liars! The symptoms that exist in your body are liars, because they are trying to convince you that God's healing isn't available to you. I think this is a key idea that a lot of  "faith people" have missed. If you have a cold, and you say "I do not have a cold," then you become a liar. But if you have a cold and you say "Lord, I thank you because Your healing of this cold belongs to me, and I am ready to see it happen in my body!" then that is faith! Don't let your symptoms lie to you!

The next week we visited with the oncologist again, and found out what my chemotherapy treatment schedule will probably be like. We don't believe in ignoring a health problem just because you prayed about it... I'll talk more about that in the next post. We also asked him whether it was okay for me to continue to teach the class and also volunteer on church worship team, and he said as long as I am physically up to it (chemo can make you very tired) and as long as I am careful to keep clean around the kids (for my safety and theirs), it's okay to continue to do those things. I've been told by several nurses at the treatment center that it's important to continue to do the things that give you joy if you can, and nothing gives me more joy than sharing Jesus with others!

Continued in Part 4...

It's a Long Story... Part 2

 If you haven't read Part 1, you might head there first...

I had never had a CT scan before. Basically they put you on a hard bed ("bed" is a pretty generous word for it) and the bed moves through a giant donut a number of times. The picture on the right is what the CT machine looks like, although this is not the one I was on. The hope of doing the CT scans was to verify that the tumor was limited to my esophagus and had not spread to the rest of my body. We waited patiently for the results to appear in the hospital poral, and when we got them, I shared them with my son, who is well on his way to a biology degree so he knows a little bit and can look up even more, and then we showed it to my sister-in-law, who worked as an RN for many years.

Unfortunately, the results showed more stuff we didn't want to see. In addition to the tumor in my esophagus, the reports pointed out areas of concern in part of my lungs, liver, and adrenal glands. But there was also a lot of "this appeared normal, that was unremarkable" stuff that you want to see (if it's unremarkable, that means it's healthy). A CT scan is not very deterministic when it comes to cancer - it just points out what to look at more closely - and my sister-in-law said that it was possible that some of those things were not cancer, but some other problem (leftovers from having COVID, for example). But we would have to wait and see what our oncologist said in our appointment the next Monday. She predicted that he would order a PET scan (she was right, he did) because that gives a pretty clear indicator of what is cancerous and what is not.

Meanwhile, she had some Bible Scripture for me. "Whenever I think about this, I keep thinking about the Bible passage about making the crooked places straight. Where is that?" We got our phones out and started researching it - she was probably remembering Luke 3:5 where this is applied to John the Baptist, but we found the source of that quote first, Isaiah 40:4. But we also found another similar passage in Isaiah: Isaiah 45:2-3.

I will go before you
   and level the exalted places,
I will break in pieces the doors of bronze
   and cut through the bars of iron,
I will give you the treasures of darkness
   and the hoards in secret places,
that you may know that it is I, the LORD,
   the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

That passage really seemed to speak to me directly - of course in context God was talking to the future king Cyrus, but I believe that God can use Scripture to speak to us in a lot of different contexts. "Level the exalted places" (some translations say "level the mountains") seemed to me to be God saying, I'll make things work out for you through this. Getting immediately referred to the very busy oncologist we would have wanted to have seemed like the first indication that this was happening. "Breaking in pieces doors of brass and bars of iron" seemed to me to be a metaphor for destruction of the blockage in my throat. And the part about God working in me (and Cyrus) to show us something great about Himself seemed amazing to me!

I didn't really know what the part about "treasures" and "hoards" (or "riches") meant, and actually I'm still looking forward to what treasures might come out of this situation, but I do know that my faith and confidence in God has grown by leaps and bounds through this so far, and that has been riches of incomparable value for me. I'll tell you more about what good stuff I expect to come out of this in upcoming posts!

Continued in Part 3...

It's a Long Story... Part 1

It was May 15, and I had an appointment to see my doctor. Nothing serious, really... it was a checkup to make sure the blood pressure medicine he had prescribed for me was working well, and because I had been checking it daily, I knew it was. There was also something I had forgotten to mention to him at my last visit, several months before, but I did remember it this time. I told him had been having a little bit of trouble swallowing when I ate too fast. I could eat just fine - I just needed to slow down and chew and not suck down my meal like a starving wolf who just caught a rabbit. He recommended that I go to a GI specialist and get scoped, so he gave me a referral and everything got set up.

Three weeks later I woke up from the scope procedure and my wife was in the room. This was unusual, because usually they just tell the person you came with to come pick you up at the door and they wheel you out to your car in a wheelchair so you don't fall down from the sedation. We figured there must be something important they wanted to tell us.

And we knew we had guessed right when the doctor himself walked in. He very professionally and gently told us that he had found an obstruction that looked to him like cancer, and he had taken a biopsy to send to the lab. We would hear back soon. And we certainly did hear back - it definitely was cancerous. The procedure was on a Thursday, and the next Tuesday I was in a CT scan machine, finding out how good I was at lying still while the bed moved underneath me!

Two and a half years before, my wife had had surgery after a long process of chemotherapy and radiation, and her cancer has been gone ever since then. We were looking forward to a day in the near future that we wouldn't have to see the inside of the cancer treatment center again... now it was looking like that day might be further in the future than we thought. The GI doctor had referred us to the same oncologist who had treated my wife; we were pretty excited, because he's a terrific doctor and we were really happy with the care he and his team had given her! The first time he walked into the room and she was sitting in the visitor chair and I was sitting on the exam bed, he did a double take. I told him "We aren't glad to NEED you, but we are sure glad to GET you!" He talked us through what he knew so far, prayed with us (doctors who pray are awesome!), and set me up for what felt like a million scans and tests and appointments (it was probably more like 5-6 in about a two week period). It was a pain the neck just to remember where to show up and when, but we made it!

Meanwhile, we started to tell a few people what was going on. The Sunday after we found out about it but before I even had my CT scans, we got to church and my wife chose a seat away from where we usually sit. When we sat down we noticed that we were sitting in front of an older couple that we've become friends with over the past year or so. As the service went on, I started to feel like I wanted to ask them to pray for us after the service, so when it ended, I said, "Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?" I knew they would pray for us, but what I didn't know is that God had brought us together that day for a reason. I was to have my test on Tuesday, but it turns out that the husband also had a medical test scheduled on Tuesday (not for cancer)... so we prayed for each other that Sunday! Their outcome was very positive - mine not as immediately positive as theirs, but to me it was clearly God saying, I'm going to make things happen for you through this!

Continued in Part 2...