Chapter 3 - Getting the Full Picture

It would be just a few days later that we learned the full extent to which Cancer had
spread through Kecia’s body. Her right breast was almost 70% tumor. Not the solid lump kind that is more easily operable, but the inflammatory kind that spreads like wildfire and is easily “disrupted” during surgery causing it to spread more. Doctors would not be able to remove it until they had shrunk it to a more manageable size. The one at the base of her spine…the one that alerted her to the problem in the first place…was actually inside her bone. It could be likened to straw with an inserted balloon. As the tumor (balloon) began to grow, the bone (straw) began to expand until it actually split in some places. The tumor had spread through the bone in one place and was actually eating away at her nerve. She reported that on a scale from 1-10, her pain level over the past month was usually a 9 or 10. The doctor reviewing her scans said he couldn’t believe Kecia had walked herself into the office. The pain she must have been in was indescribable, yet she had continued to work her full time job and two part time ones with very little complaint. Just a few weeks before, we had painted our new counseling office and moved in all of the furniture. A few times during that weekend she had needed to stop for a short break due to back pain, but she gave no indication that she suffered from the excruciating pain that can only come from having your insides eaten away by some cancerous predator. Her determination and strength still amazes me. She is one of the strongest people that I have ever met. There were at least 3 other spots dotted along her spinal cord, a few on her rib cage, one in her hip bone, and one in the lymph node under her arm. It was hard to imagine where one would even begin to treat her. The doctors agreed that using radiation to shrink the one expanding her bone, and causing so much pain in her back needed to be the first focus.

And so it began. Kecia would drive (or be driven) to the Cancer Treatment Center every day for 5 weeks. Each day they would take new scans which acted like a map of her body to ensure that the tumor was hit in the precisely desired location. Each day she would lay perfectly still while the poison worked its magic on her body and each day she prayed that this was more than just a futile attempt at buying her time until she was ready to accept the inevitable. Each day the members of Kecia’s prayer chain grew until it reached nearly a thousand at last estimate. And the letters, cards and emails of support poured in. How then was it possible that as she lay on that table, with time to do nothing but think, did she feel so alone? Was it because none of these people could truly understand what it means to stare death in the face? Was it because each of them, at the end of the day, got to go home to their families and feel safe, healthy and blessed? Or was it because she suspected that most of them believed they already knew what the outcome of treatment would be? We can’t know for sure because Kecia didn’t really talk about it. She insisted on staying strong for her parents and putting on a front that implied she knew she would get better. I talked to a friend of mine that was a nurse. She informed me that radiation and chemo are so hard on the body that given the location of Kecia’s tumors, we would be lucky if Kecia even made it 6 months. While I know it was intended to “prepare” me, I chose not to accept that. And I certainly didn’t pass that information on to Kecia. We were fighting Cancer, not accepting it! She needed to hear the possibilities not the statistics. She would NOT be a statistic. She would be the exception! And so, day after day as the medical team lifted Kecia’s body up on the radiation table, one thousand prayer warriors lifted up her request for complete healing to the Lord!