Season of Blessing (32 page)
Sylvia floated
along for the months of March, April, and May, taking her radiation treatments and her Tamoxifen, volunteering at the school, teaching the Bible study with Harry at her church, and writing letters to the children in the orphanage in León. In the afternoons, she rode her horse, visited her neighbors, and prayed for those around her.
When her lower back began to ache, she told herself that she had pulled a muscle, and went on with her life.
She threw a neighborhood party for Mark when he got his GED, then celebrated again when he got into college for the summer term.
Though she was tired from the radiation and still had frequent hot flashes from the hormone pills, she felt as if the cancer was just a part of her past. She began counting the days until the radiation would end and she could return to her work in León.
But then the oncologist ordered blood tests at her three-month checkup. Her tumor markers were elevated, so he sent her for more scans.
And a sense of dread began to fall over her again.
The doctor's face was grim as he came into the office to deliver the results. “We've got some bad news, I'm afraid. The scans showed that the cancer has metastasized to your lower spine.”
Sylvia sat frozen, not certain she had heard right. The cancer that had been cut out of her breast, blasted with chemo, burned with radiation, had now conquered her bones? She turned her stricken eyes to Harry.
She heard the groan that seeped out of him as he pulled her into his arms. “Honey⦔
“Please don't panic,” the doctor went on in a calm voice. “The skeleton is not a vital organ. This is still treatable.”
Sylvia gaped at him. Was he crazy? Not a vital organ? Did he equate her bones to tonsils or appendixes? “Not a vital organ? We're talking about my skeleton. How can you say it's not a vital organ? I can hardly live without it.”
“He's right.” Harry's voice trembled. “The truth is, the prognosis can still be pretty good with this kind of cancer. If it were in your liver or your brain or your lungs, we'd have a bigger challenge.”
So she should be grateful that it had only attacked her bones? All that time that she'd thought she was out of the woods, had it been laying ambush to her spine? Would it begin to attack her joints, her skull, her limbs? She didn't want to think about what was to come. She'd felt so good knowing the cancer had disappeared, that she had fought it back valiantly, and that it had fled. But now it was back, hunkering down in her body, waiting to attack other cells and organs. “What does this mean?” she managed to ask.
“Well, for right now I think the best approach is to change your hormone therapy,” the doctor said. “We'll see how the cancer responds to that. Meanwhile, we'll just continue with the radiation and pray.”
Sylvia was quiet all the way home, and so was Harry. She'd believed she was out of the woods, but now she felt so deep in them that she couldn't see her way out. The cancer could still kill her, despite her efforts to fight it.
She thought of her grandbaby, little Breanna. Would she watch her grow up after all? Would she be around when Jeff found the right girl and married? Would she hold any more of Sarah's babies?
And would she ever be able to return to her work, and hold little Juan and the Nicaraguan children who were so much like her own? Was all that behind her forever?
When they got home, Harry sat down. “Honey, talk to me.”
She paced across the room, her arms crossed. “I can't,” she said.
“Yes, you can.”
“No. I just want to read. I want to get all the books I have about cancer and dig into your medical journals, and try to find out what my chances are.”
“They're good, Sylvia. Very good. You can't give up yet.”
Tears glistened in her eyes. “But I thought I was cured. I know they tell you not to think that until you've been cancer-free for five years, but I still thought it. I'm not prepared to fight metastatic disease. I'm afraid of this cancer, Harry! It's so aggressive, nothing can kill it.”
“It can be stopped,” Harry said. “Honey, you just have to have faith.”
Sylvia finally sat down beside him. “I've presumed on God,” she whispered. “All this time I've been sure that he would send us back to the mission field, let us resume our work, allow us to bear more fruit. But he's got other plans, hasn't he?”
Harry's mouth quivered at the corners, and she saw him struggling with the tears in his eyes. “Maybe for now.”
“His ways are not our ways.” She breathed a humorless laugh. “That makes me so mad. What is he doing?”
“I don't know.” He pulled her forehead against his, and started to cry.
She touched the tears on his face, and pulled back to look into the agony in his eyes. “Oh, Harry.” She hated seeing him so sad, and she knew that her own pain provoked that sadness. She had to pull herself together. If not for herself, then for him.
They wept together for a few moments, then finally, she dried her tears. “I'm gonna be okay,” she said, drying his face with her fingertips. “I am, Harry. I'm going to fight and do everything that the doctors tell me to do, and I'm going to trust the Lord, whatever he chooses to do.”
Harry swallowed and nodded. “That's my girl.”
“We can't live in fear,” she told him. “That's no way to live. We'll have to figure out a way to live life without constantly thinking about it.”
He made a valiant effort to wipe the emotion from his face.
“Remember when I said that cancer was a gift God had given me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I said that, believing it would go away. But it's still probably true. If God gave it to me, then it's a gift. An opportunity. I have to find a way to think of it as that again. Would you pray that for me, Harry?”
He didn't wait until he was alone. Instead he just held her, and began to pray.
That night
when she had her bearings, she called her children and each of her neighbors individually and told them the news. They were each crushed and quiet, and had little to say in the way of comfort. But Sylvia hadn't expected otherwise. They were as shocked as she, and it would take a few days to sort out all these emotions and figure out what to think.
That night as she and Harry lay in bed next to each other, neither tried to fool the other into thinking they were sleeping.
“The thing I hate most about all this,” Sylvia whispered, “is that I've always hoped that if I ever came to a place like this where I had a terminal disease and was going to die⦔
Harry cut in immediately. “You are not going to die.”
“But you know what I mean, Harry,” she said. “I hoped that if I ever had a terminal illness, I would handle it as a godly woman with a positive attitude and a cheerful heart. I hoped I would focus more on the people around me than on myself, that I'd worry more about whether their spiritual needs were being met than I would about my own physical needs. But that's not how I am.”
He touched her face. “How can you say that? You're the most godly woman I know. Anyone would agree.”
“But
anyone
doesn't know what's going on inside of me,” she said. “I feel so angry and so out of control. I want to scream and holler at God and ask him what in the world he thinks he's doing. I want to yell at everybody who's healthy, that they'd better enjoy it while they can because it could be snatched out from under them at any moment. And I want to scream at all those complacent Christians sitting in the pews on Sunday mornings and doing nothing with their lives, wasting their talents and gifts God has given them when they could be out sharing the love of Christ.”
“I feel the same way. Honey, it's not ungodly to feel all those things.”
“But that's not what I want to feel,” she said. “I want to be someone that God would be proud of. If I'm going to die, I want to go out with a bang, you know? And don't say I'm not going to die again because we're all going to die someday. Whenever it is, I want to do it right.”
He wiped the tears off of his face with the top of the sheet. “Honey, God's going to give you whatever you need to get through this. You can believe that. The one thing we've learned over all these years is that God is faithful. Haven't we learned that?”
“Yes, we have.” Sylvia let the tears run down her temples and through her hair onto her pillow. “I wonder if I'll live to see my hair grow all the way back in.”
“Of course you will,” he said. “It's long enough now that you could go without your wig.”
She was quiet for a moment, trying to picture herself as she'd been before the surgery, with her body whole and her hair just the way she'd chosen to wear it.
“It's strange, going from thinking of myself as being healthy and healed, to realizing that my fight is not over.”
“No, it's not over,” he said, “but you don't have to worry, Sylvia, because you're not fighting it alone.” He slipped his arms around her and pulled her close, and they wept together long into the night.
Instead of slowing Sylvia down, the news of her recurrence spurred her onward, faster, with more fierce urgency to do the things that she felt God had called her to do. Since the Breezewood Development Center didn't close for the summer, Sylvia spent more hours than ever at the school, working with the children. Little Bo began to meet her at the door each morning. “Miva,” he would call her, in his own special combination of “Miss” and “Sylvia.”
As if the Lord wanted to show her that her work did please him, the children had all managed to learn their own version of “Jesus Loves Me.” The tunes varied, but the sounds of their awkward words hit close to the real words. Even their attention spans seemed to have broadened. Sylvia had a calming influence on them, and they loved to hear her read. She had advanced from the wordless book to reading actual stories. Still, each day she went over the wordless book again, until each child considered it his favorite book, the only one that some of them could “read.”
Sylvia didn't stop with the children. In the afternoons, she spent time teaching Bible to Brenda's kids, while Brenda did her typing.
On Wednesday nights, she and Harry kept teaching the Bible study at church. And on Thursday nights she and her neighbors gathered to pray.
In between all her work, she wrote the children in the orphanage in León individual letters letting them know she loved them and missed them.
There was little time for self-pity, even though her back had begun to ache constantly as the cancer sank its teeth deeper into her bones. There was no kidding herself that the new drug was working.
She knew from deep within that the cancer was growing, occupying more territory, overthrowing her body.
But there was little that she could do, except press on, and trust that God had things under control.
