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"I need you now
more than ever," I whispered
In the Palm of His Hand
by T. Suzanne Eller
Muskogee, Oklahoma
I first noticed it as I lay
on the hard mattress of the cot at the kids’ camp where I was a counselor. There
was a small lump in my chest. And like the Princess and the Pea, I couldn’t
quite get comfortable enough to fall asleep. Many things crossed my mind as I
tossed and turned through the night—my children; my work; Richard, my
husband; and my homework from night school—but never did I think of cancer.
I was only 31.
I’d just skated through
a physical six months ago.
I felt busy, happy, fit.
So during the next few
weeks I did what a lot of women might do: I put the discomfort out of my mind
and pushed through my long days. Not only was I a working mother with three
young kids, but I also taught Sunday school, was a youth sponsor and took
courses at the local college.
Who wouldn’t feel tired?
A good weekend’s sleep, I thought, that’s all I need. Yet exhaustion continued
to shroud me as the weeks passed.
Finally, after two
months of this lethargy, I called for another checkup. I lay on the hard,
paper-covered mat of my doctor’s examining table. He probed the lump in my
chest, frowning. “How long have you known about this?”
“Two, three months,” I
said.
“I’m afraid it could be
serious.”
The next thing I knew a
stream of nurses and technicians ushered me through a dizzying barrage of tests.
My doctor returned with a surgeon to explain the situation to me, the two of
them using a nightmare’s list of words—biopsy, oncologist, radiation,
mastectomy, metastasized. I was scheduled for surgery the next morning, they
told me, and I should pack slippers and nightwear and try to sleep as well as I
could tonight.
“No,” I said, “don’t
schedule anything. I need to talk with my husband first. I need to tell my
children. I need to arrange—”
“You shouldn’t wait any
longer,” my doctor interrupted.
“Can you leave the
room?” I burst out. “Please, I just need a minute alone.”
As the door closed
behind them and the room grew quiet and still, I bowed my head and clasped my
hands. “God, I need you now more than ever,” I whispered. “I’m in a tough place
again, but this time, it is so very different.”
Years before, I had
bowed my head like this. I sat in church and heard the preacher drone on and on
about God’s love. A defiant and rebellious 14-year-old, I sat in that hardwood
pew and narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think you’re real, God, because you
definitely don’t live at my house. In my house, my mother is struggling to make
it from day to day. My older sister is hurting and running wild. In my house, my
younger sister and brother and I have to stick together, because we’re the only
sure thing in our lives.”
With all the ache and
anger I had walled up inside, I said, “So if you’re real, let me know. Now.”
In the stained-glass
dimness of the church I felt a warm light overwhelm me. In that one moment,
everything changed. Every wall inside of me washed away. As the faraway voice of
the preacher sang the wonder of God’s love, I felt buoyed in the palm of his hand.
Where I had been angry and hard and hurt, I felt suddenly forgiving and
peaceful. Where I had expected nothing, I received everything.
By the time my doctor
knocked at the door, I had regained some of the comfort of having God under me,
some of the strength I had drawn upon for the last 17 years. “Tomorrow will be
fine,” I said, “for surgery.”
I walked slowly to the
parking lot, got in my car, and drove home, thinking how unprepared I was for
all of this. This time was different. This time I had a life I wanted more than
anything to keep and hold safe. I had children I cared for more than my own
self. I wanted to watch them grow, go to college, marry, have children of their
own. I drove around the long way home. “Tough spot or not,” I told God as I
pulled onto my street, “I’m still in the palm of your hand.”
I didn’t want to go in
and face the children alone, so I stood outside, waiting for my husband to drive
up from work. I watched the trees in the evening breeze and realized that I
hadn’t even mentioned that I’d had a doctor’s appointment. Headlights swept up
the drive. Richard got out of his car and hugged me. “What’s wrong?”
I began to cry and
stutter out the roll call of words from the afternoon.
Richard looked stunned.
We held each other and watched the sky go purple to black before going inside.
Our eldest daughter kept staring at us during dinner, as if she could sense a
strain. In bed that night, my husband and I huddled together and talked over how
best to break the news to the children, how to comfort them and each other.
The next morning we
explained the situation to the kids. My nine-year-old put her arms around me.
“Mom, the doctors said I would never run, remember?” She kicked up her tennis
shoes. In spite of being born with severe bilateral clubfeet, she played soccer
and basketball and ran track. “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said.
But my doctor was right
to move fast. That day’s biopsy showed cancer. Two days later, I went in for a
partial mastectomy. After the operation I read from the Bible on my nightstand
and felt peaceful, but every person in a white coat carried bad news into my
room. The cancer had spread. Several lymph nodes were positive. Then my doctor
came in to tell us that the CAT scan showed a spot on my brain.
The air went thin in the
room.
“If the spot is cancer,
you have a ten-percent chance of surviving the next five years—after surgery and
treatment,” he told me. “The surgery would be invasive and could affect your
memory, your vision, your speech. We’ll take an MRI tomorrow morning and go
immediately from the results. I’m sorry.”
I might die. What would
that mean to my family? I didn’t want them to suffer. I agonized over the
thought of my children having to watch me grow frail, of their having to care
for me. I began to lay out my wishes in detail to Richard, in case I came out of
the surgery altered or didn’t come out at all.
Richard picked the Bible
up off the nightstand, his hand kneading the leather. “Stop,” he said. “Don’t
talk like that.”
“Listen to me, Richard.”
“No,” he said, “you
listen—I don’t want you to talk anymore, please.”
He opened the pages to
Corinthians and read: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the
excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” I knew the passage and
heard his voice grow far away as the words washed over me: “We are troubled on
every side, yet not distressed: we are perplexed, but not in despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”
All the next day we
waited for the MRI results, my room crowded with friends and family. My pastor
led us in grace before lunch. Each time the door opened, everyone held
stock-still. It was always a nurse or orderly. Then the door burst open. “It’s
gone!” my doctor shouted. “The spot’s gone!”
The room erupted. My
pastor leaped in the air. My mother-in-law beamed and clapped her hands. And
Richard slumped against the wall and wept. My chance for survival had increased.
Later, my doctor told us
that there was no explanation for a spot to have shown up on the CAT scan and
not on the MRI. “I’m a man of science and not miracles,” he said, shaking his
head, “but I’d say you’ve been out of my hands since that first afternoon.”
Two weeks later I sat in
a chair and closed my eyes as the nurse administered my first dose of
chemotherapy. I must have dozed off, because I could see myself lying there with
the IV, Richard sitting beside me. Two others loomed tall behind me, one on each
side, sort of hemming me in where I lay. Specialists, maybe? I couldn’t see
their faces, which were in shadow, but I knew by their stance that they were
protecting me.
On the drive home I
asked Richard who they were.
“It was just you and me,
Suzie, and a nurse in and out to check on things.”
“No one else? You’re
sure?”
“Positive.”
We came home, made
dinner and played volleyball in the back yard with the kids. After we put them
to bed, my mother-in-law phoned to see how my treatment had gone. “How do you
feel?” she asked.
“It’s unbelievable,” I
said, “but I feel great!”
“Well, I asked God to
send you my guardian angel this afternoon. I wanted you to have two. You needed
them both in that room.”
The image of those two
figures came back to me, and the hair on my arms and neck went electric. “I saw
them,” I said, shaking as I told her. God was not only real, he was present,
holding me and my family in his unwavering hands.
To this day, eight years
later, I still shiver when I consider my progress. Beyond all understanding, I
felt good enough to go back to work two weeks after the operation. I gained
weight and didn’t lose my hair. During the long months of treatment, I never
once felt like a cancer patient with a less than 40-percent chance of survival.
No matter what happened, no matter what my illness held in store for me, I could
never doubt those sure hands. It’s as if I stood, day after day, with my head
bowed and my own hands cupped in front of me, expecting nothing, yet receiving,
as always, everything.
The above article originally
appeared in the November/December 1999
issue of Angels
On Earth. To subscribe to Angels On Earth click
here.
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