The Ask — Cancer house

“When sorrows come, they don’t come as single spies but as battalions.” Hamlet

Rainy Day and Mondays: Last Monday, it was pouring and my husband who has been having on-going health issues went in for an MRI. That day, I was also to be marked up for my radiation treatment. When I got to Dan’s office (he’s a radiation oncologist), he said, “Oh no! I left my wedding band in the MRI locker.” I assured him that the ring would probably show up. He called the office and no ring. I’ve never seen him so despondent. He just kept saying, “I’ve had that ring 41 years….” Then when we got home, our roof was leaking.

Mercury in retrograde: All the weird stuff had begun happening two weeks before when my daughter thought she had lost her car keys and had to borrow a car for work. That was when the Mercury retrograde began—that’s a time when things electrical and otherwise go wonky. The keys showed up but that was the weekend of my distressing PET scan as well. And then friends came over last Saturday to lakehouse and when it came time for them to leave, their keys were missing. So they borrowed our car to get home, and it turned out Elizabeth had picked up their keys that looked identical to theirs. Besides other problems and electrical stuff, our refrigerator at lake went out, my fitbit died, I lost my credit card, and more.

On Wednesday Elizabeth my daughter, 6 yr old grandson Henry and I went to Nashville to see a highly recommended triple negative expert at the Sarah Cannon research institute. But before we left, I stopped for gas. My brand new, newly-delivered credit card got declined. What?????? So I called the credit card company, and they said my account was still locked despite my calling to activate new card. Okay easy fix, but still distressing before a trip.

Elizabeth is one of my favorite traveling companions. Dan couldn’t go because he was having his throat dilated—something that has happened on a recurring basis since October when gall bladder became gangrenous. That was okay, Elizabeth is a safe driver and great conversationalist and tolerates me when I ask her to listen to podcasts that interest me like https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/what-cancer-takes-away a beautifully written essay about breast cancer.

Along the way, Elizabeth and I had some good talks abut how God and how prayer work. We didn’t conclude anything except that God’s greatest attribute is he/she works in mysterious ways. Elizabeth argued that there was something about asking. I said, “I believe in prayer but I’m not sure about the idea of a God who would require us to keep petitioning when so many things at stake—like a child who is dying of cancer. God knows what we need before we ask.” Scriptures support both positions. Some say "Well, the answers to prayer are yes, no and wait.” How convenient—they’ve covered all bases. As for answered prayer, that’s a perplexing one. If we take the sovereignty of God to its logical conclusion (God is in control of everything and he knew us before we were formed), we have to conclude God caused the cancer we are asking him/her to heal in the first place. I told her that I’m beginning to think that “Ask and you shall be answered, seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be open to you,” means if we truly begin to look at the world and people around us, we begin to see wonder and that God is with us. That’s the true answer. Prayer is less of a shopping list for me now and more of a gratitude list.

We arrived at Sarah Cannon in plenty of time. Went to Parthenon park so 6 year old Henry could run around. Reminded me of a previous visit 41 years earlier when Dan and I stopped there on our second day of marriage on our way to Texas for his job at Texas Instruments.

My appt. was at 2:45. We waited and waited. That was the downside of seeing a triple negative expert. Henry was good as gold waiting. Finally after 4, Denise Yardley appeared—a tiny, brilliant woman with a head full of knowledge—and she began throwing out ideas about my case. Elizabeth was my skilled amanuensis. Dr. Yardley said that my cancer is behaving badly and it needed “adult supervision in my body” and not just radiation but radiation AND something—biologic agents like tcnentrique or radiation accelerating drugs like carboplatin (which I’ve had before) and anti-hormone therapy. Too much to list here. If my cancer came back she would categorize me as metastatic which really shocked me, and then she would perhaps treat me with CDK46 which is advertising right now as Ibrance for metastatic cancer. She said what everyone says, “Your cancer is not normal. We can try this and you’re almost NED, so maybe it will work.” After 30 minutes, we thanked her and departed.

Nashville 5 o’clock traffic. Stop and go. Stopped for dinner—regrouped. Elizabeth felt more positive than I That’s her nature—at age 4 she said in response to old Pop-eye movie, “The Good wins over the Bad”. It wasn’t until later than I realized what had overwhelmed me—the word metastatic and that I could be treating this forever. It’s just semantics but words are powerful. I’m not going to think that way, though. Once Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when someone gleefully suggested she would die in 6 months of her pancreatic cancer, said “I will live.” That guy is dead now, and she’s still alive after beating cancer 3 times. Shes my role model.

Now this is where is gets weird. Somewhere 60 miles outside of Nashville, the car flashed a warning sign. “Hybrid system failure, pull over and turn car off and on.” I told Elizabeth of warning—we were on top of mountain and no good place to pull over. In a few minutes, the power steering and brakes went out; the car started flashing all kinds of warning. It was getting dark. Both Elizabeth and I agreed it was time to pull over regardless. The car was dying. Our phones were dying. On 1-40 East’s shoulder, Henry began having panic attacks because he had recently been in a fender bender. Elizabeth called Dan and he said he’d meet us (driving an hour and half) despite his earlier procedure. We called our Subaru road side assistance and the woman who answered was as slow as molasses. But she contacted towing co.— 90 minutes they said—and there we sat in the dark with no flashers on a curve. Yikes. Elizabeth kept reassuring Henry we would be okay and to watch his ipad which we had charged at restaurant. We also called 911 before our phones died. They said they’d send a highway patrol asap. We got our location from gps which fortunately kept working for about 15 minutes, so we could pass along our location to tow truck, the officer and Dan. A blessing. Elizabeth was cool as a cucumber as she negotiated most of this. Poor Henry would cry and then pass out from stress.

Finally the officer showed up. an hour later. The car was steamy and we were sweltering because Henry wouldn’t let us open the car door. We left keys in the car for tow, and Dan met us at Cookeville exit where the officer had dropped us. By that time, Henry was calm and felt safe. At the truck stop he saw a man with hair twisted on his head like a dark turban. I thought it looked a little odd, but Henry called him a genie.

We were so grateful to get home at 1 AM. Honestly at some point I thought we might not get home that night and worried about Elizabeth’s next day trip to Boston.

The next day the dealership told us, my car batteries had died while Elizabeth was driving, and the car had shut down. My 2016 cross trek hybrid has 3 batteries—one for start stop and one as regular battery and one which is the special hybrid battery. The batteries tend to die between 50-70,00 miles. My car was at 62,000. And the 5 o’clock Nashville traffic had apparently killed everything (except us).

Silently, I had been praying and am grateful for the wonder of care that surrounded us. It took a child to recognize it. Instead of seeing an odd person at a truck stop, Henry saw a genie.

Ever since the whole adventure, I’ve been thinking about prayer. When Dan was in med school, and I’d have 2-3 kids in tow in our new town, Memphis, I drove a 78 Oldsmobile with no gas gauge and a water pump that fell out one time when I was on expressway. I wrote an essay about all of this called “Faith and the Clunker” which did pretty well at one writers’ conference in Ohio in the 1990s. One story was about how our car broke down outside of Tupelo, Mississippi—out of gas although I thought I’d filled up enough. I had the kids with me: a 6 yr old, a 4 yr. old and an 18 month old. When the car broke down on the isolated road at dusk, I asked the kids to say a quick prayer with me, and they did. I told them with complete confidence that someone would come and help us. We got out of the car and began to walk along the lonely highway, the baby in my arms and the toddlers holding my hand. Within 5 minutes, a shady looking car with 3 sketchy characters came up behind us, and a woman got out and said, “Can we help you? “ I was nervous, but I realized I had to trust her, so I put on my big-girl pants and said “Yes, please. Can you drive us to the next exit? “ So the kids and I piled in. The woman said very kindly, “I remember how hard it was when my kids were small like that.” We got to service station a mile away, and after filling my gas can, we were on our way.

BTW Dan never found his ring. That’s okay—it’s replaceable. My epiphany about prayer? It’s not that prayer changes things necessarily (I hate hate hate religious cliches because they trivialize God) but that prayer changes us. I wish I had taken a moment to pray quietly with my grandson to soothe him and to reassure him that Papa was indeed on his way, but to say in real words God was with us and we would get help. And really soon. Just the action of prayer—stopping to breathe and meditate is therapeutic. There is something in the humbling of self to ask—not that God needs it—but that we and others are changed by it. As my wise friend Mary Baldridge says, “We are put on earth to bless and heal others.” Amen.

Henry and I at Parthenon

Henry waiting patiently.

Our highway patrol friend.