Who you gonna call?
Follow up to “I Want To Live Like There’s No Tomorrow, Lord”
Answer these 3 questions in you head:
What would you do if:
1. You are hungry?
2. You need to go somewhere?
3. You need new clothes?
I would have answered: 1. Call DoorDash, 2. Hop in my truck, and 3. Shop online
Missionaries, on the other hand, many of them would say “Pray. Pray. Pray.”
I’m a pragmatic person. I plan, I prepare, I execute, and then I complete. I can get many things done. I have gone through most of my life in this way, becoming self-reliant. I noticed that the more confidence I gained in my own ability, the less I needed God. I relied on myself for things in which I believed that I could control the outcome. This resulted in me praying less and relying on God less.
When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I struggled immensely on whether to have post-surgery radiation therapy. My surgeon highly recommended it because he felt that the non-existent surgical margins suggested that there may be some microscopic diseases remaining. This adjuvant treatment would reduce my chances of recurrence. On the other hand, there are significant potential side effects of radiation: loss of teeth, dry mouth, loss of smell, loss of taste, secondary tumors. In addition, over the 5 years prior to this, I had seen my dad’s two younger siblings both die of lung cancer from what many in my family believed was the radiation they received while they were in Japan during the two atomic bomb explosions in WWII. This caused a fear inside me that radiation would be bad for me.
I looked for an answer and as an engineer and a pragmatic person, I expected that I should be able to find a straight forward, logical answer to the question of whether I should do the radiation treatment. I started to search for answers. I spoke to 3 different pathologist. Then I spoke to 3 difference surgeons at 3 different hospitals. The more I searched, the more I realized that there was not a definitive answer, the harder I prayed because I had no where else and no one else to turn to.
I thought perhaps I might be able to make an assessment based on probability. I searched online to try to understand what the probabilities in outcomes of similar cancer cases vs radiation. There was not significant studies out there due to the rarity of my cancer, and I learned that unlike mass-manufactured machines, each cancer case is uniquely different. The more I searched, the more I realized that there was no answer, and the more compelled I was to pray for an answer from God.
In the end, I did not find a conclusive answer. I did not have a good assessment or prediction of probability. As a patient and as an engineer, this made me very uncomfortable. The only thing I felt that I could do was pray, and pray even harder.
In the end, I had spent so much time looking for the correct answer that my time window for adjuvant radiation therapy had closed. Initially, I felt like God didn’t give me an answer—he didn’t answer my prayer. As time passed and I reflected back, I realized that he had already led me to the answer, but I was not paying careful enough attention initially.
4 years later, I had a second surgery with a different doctor, after which that doctor did not recommend radiation. I miraculously had no pain and took no painkillers after surgery. This permitted me to drive home the next day while still bandaged across my face and with a post-surgery drain bag attached. I thought my prayers were answered with this surgery.
9 years after my second surgery, I had my third surgery, but this time, the doctor appeared to have missed a significant portion of the tumor since post-surgery MRI scans showed the tumor still present. I asked this doctor to go back in to remove the remaining disease. He refused and said that I needed to follow up with radiation treatment. At this time, I knew that was not what God wanted me to do. I refused radiation treatment and went to a different surgeon.
For my 4th surgery, my surgeon recommended that it was best to take the tumor and the associate Zygomatic nerve (one of the main facial nerves) to get wider margins and thus reduce the chances of recurrence. It would cause left side facial paralysis, at least temporarily. She would graft the severed nerve and there would be an 80% chance that the nerve would rejoin over the next 2 years so that I would have some partial functionality. To both our surprise, even though she took the nerve I woke from surgery with full facial nerve functionality. I didn’t have any facial paralysis. My surgeon explained that my nerves had already previously rerouted themselves due to trauma from past surgeries.
It’s been 10 years since my last surgery.
I’ve realized that sometimes God takes us out into deep waters where we cannot rely on ourselves because we cannot see the shore. He teaches us to pray and trust in Him so that we can strengthen our faith and learn that He loves us and does not leave us.
“Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander
And my faith will be made stronger
In the presence of my Saviour”
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“Oceans” by Hillsong United is a reminder of my journey: