A Cruel Companion: Cancer

[His Blood] reaches to the highest mountain, and it flows to the lowest valley;

The blood that gives me strength from day to day, it will never lose its power!

~Andrae Crouch

I'm at the hospital today with a friend. She's having surgery. 

You see, she has been diagnosed with breast cancer. It's an estrogen feeding variety. It would be great if it were the strawberry ice cream feeding kind. I hear those are a lot nicer! But she wasn't that lucky.

So here she is today, less than a month after her double mastectomy, having her ovaries and more lymph nodes removed. She is represented by a case number on a screen that provides her status... right now it reads "Surgery In Progress".

It's the most drastic weight loss plan I've ever seen. Take one organ at a time until there's nothing left of you. Admitedly, not one I'm signing up for any time soon.

I've been involved with Ovarian Cancer awareness but this is different. The ovaries may be the source of food but they aren't the source of her cancer. So losing them seems a little backwards. So much is not the way she thought it would be. 

But for her, the disfigurement is the most difficult to grasp. 

Her type of cancer is a brutal companion. It delivers bad news like a punch in the gut. Just as she recovers from one blow, here comes another. It may never go away. Only wait in the corner for its next title card fight.

And as the fighter she is, my friend just keeps swinging; waiting for the bell to sound so she can rest for a moment and start the next round.

With strength. With dignity. With grace. Not always perfectly but standing so bravely.

Please pray for her; for all those who are battling for their lives. And for their loved ones who are warriors in the fight with them. As I sit in this crowded waiting room, knowing it's not my daughter or mother or sister but my friend, I look around and know that others are so much more intimately invovled. For some, the people who are represented on the screen are their whole life! And I can only thank God that He is bigger than the word cancer.

My God is so big, so strong and so mighty! There's nothing my God cannot do!