4 Treatments and a CT

It's been a while since I've posted an update! That's because most of cancer treatment, when it's working as intended, is frankly pretty boring... they set you up on a schedule where you show up for chemo treatments every so often (in Cat's case, once a week... in mine, once every two weeks) and then you put up with side effects until the next treatment rolls around. Rinse, repeat, and eventually the oncologist evaluates your progress and maybe you keep doing it or maybe not. So it's been a boring road for the past few weeks with not a lot of news. Not until today!

When we first started treatment, our doctor told me we would do four cycles and then get a CT scan and see what our progress looked like. The CT scan happened Friday. We got to see the text report on Saturday, and we started to get really excited! But I didn't want to share it until we got to talk to the actual doctor. Today (Monday) we get to see him, and he's excited too! The report basically goes through every bit of cancer they initially found, and tells us how much SMALLER it is! The whole goal of chemo treatment is to attack the cancer and reduce the size until either it goes away completely or it is small enough to attack using radiation or surgery. In his office he actually showed us the before-treatment and now versions of the same CT scan side by side, and the tumors are visibly much smaller! The treatment is doing exactly what it's supposed to! Praise God!

On top of that, he had some really exciting news... there is a new chemo drug that was just approved for use less than a week ago. I'll call it "Yabba-dabba-doo" because I can't remember drug names but they all sound like the names of Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters to me. If insurance will pay for the Yabba-dabba-doo, it will replace one of the drugs we're using now, and reportedly has a 37% better effectiveness. This means that what we're already doing is doing amazing things, but we may be able to accelerate even more!

Please understand that we are not relying on only the chemotherapy. Most nights when I lie down to go to sleep, I pray "Thank you, God, that You are my healer." I have a list of healing-related Scriptures on my phone, some of which I've shared here already, and I look at them often. Faith in God is absolutely a part of all of this! But we believe, as I've shared before, that God also created medicine to help the body heal itself, so we take advantage of it all!

Water and Fire

I won't be scared of the fire or scared of the water
You're the great overcomer, You're living in me
You are the man in the fire, You walked on the water
You're the great overcomer, Emmanuel!

As we sang this song in my church last Sunday, I was reminded of one of my favorite Scriptures to meditate on during cancer treatment. But my take on it is a little different from the more traditional interpretation... or is it?

In the Bible, "water" typically is used for washing and cleansing. This would be like washing your hands or your feet, washing your clothes, washing food to prepare it, that sort of thing. The waters of the sea were a great food source via fishing. But in the ancient world, the sea also could be a terrifying, dangerous place. There was a time when Jesus' disciples were caught in a storm on the sea that was so bad that they feared for their lives... but then Jesus came to them actually walking ON the water they were so afraid of, and then He exercised authority over it and stopped the storm (Mark 6:45-52).

"Fire", on the other hand, often represents purification - melting down metals to remove impurities, for example, and making animal sacrifices to purify the people of their sins. In one notable story, three faithful Israelites were thrown into a fire to execute them, and God saved them from it - they came out perfectly unharmed (Daniel 3:8-30).

These were likely some of the kinds of thoughts that would have occurred to an ancient reader of this passage from Isaiah 43:1-3:

But now thus says the LORD,
he who created you, O Jacob,
   he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
   I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
   and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
   and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God,
   the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

Let me take a little detour here. When my wife Cat was undergoing cancer treatment, her experience was this: first, they did chemotherapy treatments on her to reduce the size of the cancer tumor. Basically, chemotherapy involves sitting in a comfy chair for hours at a time while they pump various medicines into you through an IV. Once they decided that the many chemo treatments had had the effect they wanted, they sent her in for radiation treatments. In those they send radiation into your body in such a way that it basically burns up the cancer cells. They are very accurate with radiation treatments these days, but just like with sun radiation at the beach, you can sometimes get burns even on your skin. I understand that chemo and then radiation is a common way to treat many cancers. (I don't know yet if I will ever undergo radiation treatments - stay tuned!)

So when I read that passage and it says "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you," it reminds me of the hours of liquid medicine during chemotherapy. And when I read "when you walk through fire you shall not be burned," I'm reminded of the burning effects of radiation therapy. I choose to take this prophecy, in my own life, as a promise that whatever of those therapies I happen to be doing at the time, God is with me, protecting me from any harm that they could inadvertently do!

I won't be scared of the fire or scared of the water
You're the great overcomer, You're living in me
You are the man in the fire, You walked on the water
You're the great overcomer, Emmanuel!

 

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For the full story of my cancer journey, start here - or just explore all of the posts I've tagged "cancer".