All Shook Up

All Shook Up

It’s amazing how quickly your world can fall apart. One minute life seems pretty good, and the next minute you’re wondering how you ever will survive. On a big scale, events like the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination, and 9/11 remind us that life is precarious. (On a much smaller scale, one minute you’re laughing in the summer rain on a boat ride, and the next minute you’re losing your lunch into a plastic bag!)

A health crisis has the ability to shake our world in ways difficult to comprehend. Recently I surveyed a bunch of my cancer survivor friends for remembrances of the day their world fell apart.

Surreal is the term Wayne uses to describe how it felt to be told he had Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of forty-seven.

“My family, like me, was in shock—pure disbelief,” he recalls thirteen years later. “I recently had gone twenty years without missing a full day of work to illness, and now I had cancer? I couldn’t believe it.”

Ken was equally surprised nine years ago when his tongue cancer finally was diagnosed after two years of reassurances that the enlarged lymph node was “nothing to worry about.”

“When the doctor finally did say the word cancer, I was in total shock,” Ken recalls. “I had no symptoms, and I was in great shape for a forty-six-year-old man! I told someone I felt as if I had entered the Twilight Zone and nothing was recognizable.”

Cathy says “denial and total shock” were the first two emotions she experienced after being told in November 2009 that she had breast cancer at age fifty-four.

“My husband’s and my emotions were very different,” she adds. “He was a lot calmer and stronger than I was.”

My nurse/reporter friend Cubby says disbelief was her first reaction to a breast cancer diagnosis at age fifty-one.

“I froze and my husband’s face turned white,” she still vividly recalls six years later. “The worst part was the fear of the unknown.”

Fear of the unknown.

I think that’s pretty much a universal response to a cancer diagnosis. The story of the day your world fell apart may be similar to these folks’, or it might be quite different, but I’m willing to bet that after those initial strong emotions wore off, you were left with the same question for yourself or your loved one: What’s going to happen next?

How difficult will the treatment be?

Will I/they get sick?

Can I/they keep working?

And the million-dollar question: Will I/they be cured?

I, of course, will answer all those questions for you in this book . . . yeah, right. I have no magic tea leaves for your or your loved one’s future. I believe there’s a good chance that the treatments will be easier than you think because that’s what most of our patients say—the worry before the first chemo or radiation treatment was worse than the treatment itself. I think you or your loved one probably will not get sick because there are wonderful anti-nausea drugs available today—at least three or four new ones since I was treated in 1990. (If you know people treated a long time ago for cancer, please don’t imagine your experience is likely to be the same.)

I also think there’s a good possibility you or your loved one will be able to keep up a fairly normal life. I see cancer patients every day in our office getting chemo and then heading out to their place of employment or home to do yard work. Most folks say they adjust to a “new normal” and enjoy the days with good energy, resting more on the days when fatigue sets in.

And if you want to know the overall survival odds, 66 percent of adult cancer patients are still alive five years after their diagnosis, according to the National Cancer Institute.^a

Of course, I can’t promise my observations will come true for you. I don’t know your future health any more than I am certain of my own. But I do know the One who knows it all.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

Jeremiah 29:11

What an incredibly comforting verse for us when our world falls apart. Just don’t miss that itty-bitty word I in the first sentence. “For I know the plans I have for you.”

Only God knows the plans for us and they are His plans, not necessarily ours. But whether His plans match ours or not, we can be confident they are good ones and designed to give us hope. Jeremiah 29:12-14 continues with God’s assurances:

In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you.

Thank You, Lord, that You are not watching me from a distance, but You are close by and hear me when I pray. Please help me to trust that Your plans for my life are truly good ones. Amen.