DO YOU WANT TO LIVE?!?

I was two days into my non-elective hospital stay when I was shocked awake by a nurse screaming this question in the middle of the night. Thankfully, she wasn’t speaking/yelling at me…but I remember thinking that I had better have my answer ready, just in case my interrogation was next. Do you want to live? Well, yes! Yes, of course, I do!  After all, I had just turned 34.  I had just become an ordained pastor in the one true, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.  I had work to do.  Heck, I had life to do. Not only did I want to live, I felt like I needed to live. So yes, extremely vocal nurse person, I was ready for your question!

Turns out that it was a solo inquisition of the elderly man next door who refused to keep on his oxygen mask. Then again…it turns out, I’ve found myself answering this question a number of times and in a number of different ways over the last year.  I suppose it’s a year and a bit since my surgeon told me I have Stage IV colon cancer.  Since they told me all how very sorry they were, they are, or they will be…I suppose. A year and a bit since I found out exactly how annoyed I get when I even hear the world incurable. 

You see, I had been having stomach pain, but I had also recently spent a year living in Mexico and a few weeks travelling through  El Salvador.  And since graduation from seminary, interviews with churches, and ordination was on the horizon, it was the general consensus that I was stressed (after all, the very first words of the ordination vows I would be taking begin with the words, “Before Almighty God to whom you must give account…!”) and/or I had picked up some kind of evil stomach bug from my adventurous travels (maybe I really shouldn’t have shared that bottle of mezcal with that hitchhiker in Oaxaca, hmmm). 

Regardless, every doctor I saw asked me my age, and when they realized I wasn’t in the “risk demographic,” they moved on to a diagnosis that didn’t begin with a “can” and end with a “cer.”  I couldn’t keep food down and I had nearly constant stomach pain, but when I suggested the possibility of cancer to my general practitioner, she rolled her eyes with great frustration, told me it was NOT cancer, and also demanded that I stop googling my symptoms.  Unfortunately, ordination and a new job didn’t decrease my stress…or my stomach pain. A few weeks later I found myself at immediate care in the middle of the night (driven there by the church secretary, no less).  Immediate care sent me to the ER and the ER asked me my age…and diagnosed me with the stomach flu. Well. Good then. Except that a week later…I was still throwing up.

Ultrasounds and CAT scans were now on the menu. I’d never had a CAT scan, but I kind of found it fascinating…like an amusement park ride at the end of which they tell you your future.  A very cheery young woman called me a few days later and informed me they only saw some “swelling” in my colon and that a colonoscopy was ordered by the aforementioned eye rolling/google controlling doctor.  A colonoscopy. Sounded great. I signed up right away, and on October 26, 2011 (less than three months after my ordination), I had my first colonoscopy. Strangely, for this procedure they didn’t give me quite enough of the good stuff. So I was pretty clear headed and awake when “extra doctors” emerged from seemingly nowhere to observe and make numerous acclamations of “oh yeah, yep….there it is.” Well, that didn’t sound good. By the time they rolled me back and the doctor came to see me I was prepared for not great news. A tumor the size of a grapefruit was almost completely closing off my colon.  Of course, there was always a chance that it was benign, but “this is cancer,” the doctor said.  Talk about a shock. My dad was so shocked he had to lie down on the bed next to mine!  I can’t even imagine what must have been going through his head—my poor dad who had to watch his father die from colon cancer would now have to watch his daughter battle the same disease.  I didn’t quite know how to react. So I threw up in the bathroom. It seemed like an appropriate response.

A week later I found myself in the office of my new surgeon, who was telling me not only that I did indeed have cancer, but that it might also already be incurable. Oh, and he recited a laundry list of ways in which I could cease living seemingly spontaneously, not to mention during the surgery. He also informed me that he thought the tumor was the size of a mango. Maybe a small papaya. I didn’t know what was going on with the fruit in my abdomen, but I didn’t like it one bit. Not to mention I couldn’t eat for weeks because nothing could get past the onslaught of fruit in my colon!

But eventually surgery was upon me. Three hours later I had a foot less of my colon (I really thought those semi-colon jokes would have gotten more mileage), 34 staples holding my stomach together, and a doctor who was beginning the onslaughts of “I’m sorry’s” which seemed to be centered around phrases like “metastatic” and “we left disease behind” and “Stage IV” and “aggressive” and “three to six months.”  That last one wasn’t said to me; my family bore the burden of that opinion. If chemo doesn’t work, how long? Three to six months.

So did I want to live? Yes I did! Yes I do. Because while it’s true that I do have Stage IV cancer (and there is no Stage V)…I DO know that there is a place beyond Stage IV, and that’s where I find myself today—567 days past diagnosis.

It’s where I find myself. It’s where I find my ministry. And, sure enough, it’s where I find God too.