The Christmas Cancer

In which Our Lady figures out the Limitations of Cancer.

There’s something about Christmas that brings out the best emotions.  It was a few hours ago while watching the LDS broadcast of the Christmas Devotional that I felt an overwhelming sense of peace and contentment.  The giant projector screen hung down at the front of the chapel showed a beautiful display of Christmas trees and lights.  I heard wonderful messages of Christmas joy and holiday giving from members of the First Presidency.  And each of them personally testified of the wonderful miracle of our Savior’s Christmas birth.  I was sitting between my husband and my in-laws, with Eva playing contentedly on her Grammy’s lap and listening to the most gorgeous Mormon Tabernacle Choir songs when I felt that rush of warm gratitude for the things I have.  How blessed to sit with good family hearing about the birth of Jesus Christ through beautiful music.  Regardless of how things go at the Doctor’s office tomorrow, I am glad to have these moments.  And I realized tonight that whether or not I do cancer treatments will little affect the fact that I get to celebrate Christmas.  The anxiety I have felt over the last several weeks, and the possible trials of the upcoming weeks cannot, should not, and will not ruin my Christmas.  It’s comforting to realize that I at least have this.  However much power I imagine cancer to have over my life, it cannot take Christmas away.  My truth of the day: Cancer exerts no control whatsoever over either natural forces or national holidays. 

All Creatures Great and Small

In which our Heroine reads a Book

“Cancer lies dormant in all of us.  Like all living organisms, our bodies are making defective cells all the time.  That’s how tumors are born.  But our bodies are also equipped with a number of mechanisms that detect and keep such cells in check.  In the West, one person in four will die of cancer, but three in four will not.  Their defense mechanisms will hold out, and they will die of other causes.”  So says David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD in Anti-cancer: A New Way of Life, (2^nd edition, page 7), a book I began just this afternoon.  How absolutely frightening to think that we all have the beginnings of cancer within us.  Stopping with this only this single thought is debilitating in its finality. 

While still in hospital, a kind friend of mine—also a cancer survivor—came to visit.  She brought me the gift of a MOTAB CD and a CD player, complete with batteries, to put the CD in.  She told me that she listened to these and a few other selections of hymns for several years each night before bed.  As I already was spending my sleepless (steroid-driven) hours thinking through hymn lyrics, I found the gift particularly appropriate.  At that point in my broken life and body, I had no room for the media of the world.  I needed maximum healing and comfort.  Her gift was perfect.  One hymn on that compilation was a beautiful rendition of All Things Bright and Beautiful, a hymn less well known to me.  The song expresses the idea that 1) Heavenly Father made many beautiful wonders in our world for which we can exercise gratitude, and 2) All things are in his power.  

What a comfort to think of the control that Heavenly Father had over every single cell in my body.  It was a beginning, a foundation on which to build my faith.  I figured that if He wanted me dead, I’d already be there, as I’d survived a few harrowing experiences already that year (black ice while driving, a terrible car crash in June, and enough time without breath to turn blue on that fateful blueberry day—the day that began it all).  Each time I’d come out of these experiences, I’d had the feeling that I’d done so because it was Heavenly Father’s will.  I could not doubt that same will now, constant and unchanging as I knew Him to be. 

There are many things to be frightened of in this world, but to focus on the fear is only paralyzing.  After a short time of this despairing emotional paralysis, I had finally found a place for my faith.