Here and Back Again

“You have cancer.”
When I heard those three little words, I stopped breathing. It was surreal! I felt I was in a daze, lost somewhere between the reality of the room and the open space that defined my life.
“It’s Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”
My mind was racing. I was telling myself - “I don’t have time for cancer; I have a life to live. I have plans for my future—a planned trip to Hawaii. I just received the biggest promotion in my life. Isn’t it enough that I have diabetes and high blood pressure as well as early stages of arthritis and that I am an aging black woman? Now, this too! Get this thing out of me!”
“Do you have an oncologist?”
“No.”
“I’ll make the referral.”
And so, it begins.
This is the story of my life journey and the challenges that followed. For four years beginning with my cancer diagnosis, my life resembled a sine wave - a continuous movement of peaks and valleys. It is the tale of my three neurosurgeries, my failed attempts at relationships, my job loss, and relocation. Cancer formed a broad and deep base of my life pyramid, with everything else piled on top – my personal hierarchy of needs. Cancer is terrifying because you don’t know the outcome, and more frightening, neither do the doctors. They have studies, charts, and graphs. They have medicines and surgical procedures. They make predictions and projections, but they don’t know for sure. The people selling the funny concoctions and cure-all medicines don’t know. There are no guarantees. It is a toss-up between the disease itself and the treatment; sometimes it’s both.
In addition to the physical toll it can take on your body, there is a mental price to pay. Our lives become riddled with anxiety and pain associated with every procedure and treatment and the follow-up visit. Even addressing friends and family during the journey can be overwhelming. There were days I couldn’t breathe, nights I couldn’t sleep. I had always been a person that believed I could design and control my destiny. Whatever I believe or dreamed, I could achieve. Cancer took control of my life. I was a nervous, anxious mess. I was weak. I lived in fear.
This is the story of how I found strength for that journey. I did reach the top of the pyramid; I healed and I transformed. During my cancer journey, I found love and peace through Christ Jesus. I let go and surrendered to the grace and mercy of God. I accepted that I wasn’t in control and that I couldn’t do it alone. I also realized my cancer was not in control. I turned my cancer, my medical team and family over to God, and I prayed that God would work his will in my life. I surrendered to God the one most precious possession I had - my life. It was in that surrender to the love, grace and mercy of God I found strength.
But the initial surrender, though enough to get me through cancer, was not enough to carry me through what was to follow. I realized that I had not submitted totally to God; I held back, I didn’t fully surrender. It is hard to give up everything that once defined you to a new way of life. It proved to be my greatest challenge and my greatest reward. This was the start of a new life practice that I would carry forward into the rest of my life journey.