For the past few weeks I have occasionally mentioned a young woman named Heather who is battling a cancer diagnosed while she is pregnant. Some of you (including one seminarian) have kindly asked to be kept apprised of Heather’s situation (and the baby’s), and have kept her in your prayers.
Yesterday the patient liaison person at her hospital sent this:
We’ve all been praying for Heather…As you are aware, she had stage 3 cancer under her tongue. Since Heather found out about the cancer at the same time she learned she was pregnant, nothing could be done to address the cancer for several months. Although still pregnant, two weeks ago she began radiation to soften the cancer in hopes that it could be surgically removed after 6 weeks of radiation. Unable to talk or eat, her sole source of nutrition has been an IV tube since beginning radiation.
No doctors gave Heather much hope due to the severity and progression of the cancer. The plan was to complete radiation and then surgically remove portions of her tongue, throat, jaw and other areas affected by the cancer. This surgery was to be performed in St. Louis immediately after delivery of the baby, who will be 30 weeks by the end of radiation treatments.
Today, she went back to begin her third week of radiation. The technicians opened her mouth to position the equipment relative to the tumor. Only…this time…there was nothing there. No tumor. No cancer. Nothing anywhere on her tongue, jaw, throat, mouth…nothing. The only evidence that she ever had that cancer was a small cancerous patch on her lymphnode which the doctors expect to respond well to radiation.
What’s more…well, the unborn baby grew 1.2 pounds over the last 6 days. So, all doctors are thrilled.
Heather declared from the beginning that God would take care of her. She never lost hope or faith. God simply worked a miracle in her life. We serve a God for whom nothing is impossible. Please take a moment to thank and praise Him for this act of miraculous grace. May we all be encouraged and may our faith be strengthened as we consider that this God of miracles loves us and will work in our most challenging circumstances. Hallelujah to our God!
I know some will say, “well, it wasn’t GAWWWWD…it was the radiation, and the trained people, it was science!”
I suspect – because my religion has formed me in faith and reason, and in openness – that it was both. I don’t understand why anyone needs it to be only one or the other. Let us remember that the best combinations of scientific knowledge and human intent do not always achieve wonders, and sometimes they do.
Let us also remember that doctors do not always know everything – the best doctors will be the first to admit that – and that Western Medicine in its present form is pretty new in the grand scheme of things. 150 years ago, a doctor might have wiped his scalpel on his sleeve before beginning a surgery; 100 years ago, if a baby was deemed “too big” to deliver, the risk of infection and death following a cesarean section was so great that doctors would elect, instead, to crush the baby’s skull to facilitate delivery. 50 years ago Western Medicine thought baby formula was superior to breast milk.
So, before we get too excited about the primacy of medicine over faith, let’s consider that they may work best when they are applied together, and in humility?
Speaking of all doctors don’t know – and miracles – do you remember little Faith, the anencephalic infant who – defying all the odds – managed to survive her birth, and to breathe, hear, cry-when-hungry/wet, respond to touch and basically live the life she has, for however long she is given it? She’s still in there, fighting. Recall, she wasn’t expected to live for as long as 39 minutes. Her life is so mysterious to the doctors, who can’t believe all they do not know, that at 39 days old she had a CAT scan, to make sure she hadn’t simply been misdiagnosed:
We had a pretty good week last week. I guess the highlight would be Faith’s CAT scan, which was done on Thursday (her 5-week birthday). There were some doubts about whether or not Faith was misdiagnosed because of how well she is doing and because she is not “supposed” to have any consciousness…so we had a scan done just to see what was inside her head.
…On Friday we got the results. A neurosurgeon, neuro-radio-interventionologist (big word), and a radiologist looked at the photos and they all agreed that the diagnosis of anencephaly was correct. They have no explanation as to how she is functioning on a conscious level without a cerebrum, or how she is even alive. It’s the kind of miracle that makes atheists scratch their heads…
Heather and her baby, Faith and her mother, they can all use your prayers. What incredible heart they display by their very lives!
In both of these cases, the expedient people – who know so much more than everyone else and who think the government should be in charge of our health care – would have counseled abortions for these mothers. Perhaps a government that is footing the bill for medical care would insist on abortions, in service to an idea of “justice” and “unity” and – oh, yeah – “compassion.”
Such governments, such expedient people, would be very wrong.
But then, despite what some may believe, the government is not a teacher of love. We are that, to each other, and our babies teach love to us because they can’t help themselves about it. They are, after all, the very coming of Love.
UPDATE: The new (female) Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Cambridge: “Abortion is a blessing”. You can’t make this up.
Glory to God.
This is great news, and a touch of heaven on earth.
On earth as it is in Heaven we pray. This is that.
What great news! Thank you for telling us of Heather so that more of us could pray for her and thank you for letting us know that her condition has improved so much.
Thank you for this blog. Thank you for being prayer central for many of us.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
I have always thought that image did not mean physical appearance but rather a rational, thinking being. And man, in the image of God, has brought forth wondrous things to comfort and succor His creation. Medicines, techniques, radiation treatments. God’s hand is in every comfort with which we are blessed.
[Precisely. This is no "faith OR reason." They commingle like waves of grain in the wind - admin]
“…the expedient people – who know so much more than everyone else and who think the government should be in charge of our health care – would have counseled abortions for these mothers. Perhaps a government that is footing the bill for medical care would insist on abortions…”
This is a very edifying post up to this point. Such remarks poison any seed that might otherwise have germinated.
Speaking as someone who finds all abortions reprehensible, I hope to lead others to agreement, not by excoriating those with whom I don’t agree, but by shining a light on radical (miraculous?) alternatives.
===============================
My homework for the last two months has been digging into the many discussions of health care reform. I added so many links to Bloglines I had to create a new folder. Content is flowing in faster than I can follow, with longer, more detailed, intelligent and passionate comment threads than I have seen in four years of blogging. I make it my business to read all sides of the many arguments. And of many thousands of topics, comments and links I can’t remember coming across the word “abortion” even once.
===============================
Your post reminded me of one of Krista Tippet’s interviews. Rachel Naomi Remen is known for books that intertwine stories from life and her practice of oncology. Looking at the world from the edge of life, as she puts it, Rachel Naomi Remen offers wisdom for individuals and for our society.
If you don’t have time for emails, I’m sure you don’t have an hour to spare to listen to this program, but here is the part your post brought to mind.
Dr. Remen: But look, objectivity is a bias like anything else. I mean, the funniest story in — I think this one is in Kitchen Table Wisdom — is — this happened at Sloan-Kettering many, many years ago when I was an intern, first-year doctor. We had a man come into the hospital to die. And, you know, people use to come into the hospital to die. There wasn’t a hospice movement then, so that if your care was too difficult to achieve at home, you were admitted to the hospital to die. And this man came in riddled with cancer. He had an osteosarcoma and his bones looked like Swiss cheese. All these lesions were cancer, and there were big snowballs of cancer in his lungs. And in the two weeks or so that he was with us in the hospital, all of these lesions disappeared and they never came back, Krista.
Now, were we in awe? Certainly not. We were frustrated. Obviously someone had misdiagnosed him. So we sent the slides out to pathologists all over the country, and the pathologists sent back the slides saying classic osteogenic sarcoma, you know? So then we had a grand rounds, and the slides were shown, the X-rays were shown, the man himself was shown. And the conclusion of this large group of doctors was that the chemotherapy, which had been stopped 11 months before, had suddenly worked.
Now, the embarrassing part of this story is that I believed this. For the next 15 years I never questioned this conclusion. I think too great a scientific objectivity can make you blind.
Ms. Tippett: What do you think now?
Dr. Remen: I think that that was one of the purist encounters with mystery that I have ever had in my life. It makes me wonder about who we are, what’s possible for us, how this world really operates. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions, and those questions have helped me to live better than any answers I might find.
You see, even infidels are capable of wonder.
[I wasn't calling doctors or scientists infidels, Hoots - in fact I made a point of saying that the very best of them know that there is much they don't know. While I admit I could have written the last bit better, I meant it in a political sense, not in terms of faith and reason. My problem is not with scientists, whom I respect and whom I also believe work "with God" whether they know it or not, but with the political, agendized folks who insist that they're going to know better than the rest of us - INCLUDING our doctors - about how we should be treated, or left to die. I am at war with the mentality that is growing in the UK and elsewhere (and which I fear will quickly take hold, here in America) that says "better off dead than a burden to society" and thus diminishes the humanity and our very mystery - to a bottom line of mere dollars and cents. - admin]
Anchoress, what wonderful news! We pray for Heather’s continued healing, and ask the intercession of St. Gianna Berretta Molla, whose life exemplifies the heroism of a mom:
Jesus, I promise You to submit myself to all that You permit to befall me,
make me only know Your will.
My most sweet Jesus, infinitely merciful God, most tender Father of souls,
and in a particular way of the most weak, most miserable, most infirm
which You carry with special tenderness between Your divine arms,
I come to You to ask You, through the love and merits of Your Sacred Heart,
the grace to comprehend and to do always Your holy will,
the grace to confide in You,
the grace to rest securely through time and eternity in Your loving divine arms.
I just want to correct the record that the email I sent to you, A., was not sent as Heather’s patient liason. I do work for the hospital system where she’s receiving treatment, but I know what’s happening with her because her dad and stepmother are friends from church. I asked for prayer as her friend and sister in Christ, not in relation to my job.
As to faith v. reason, why is it that God can’t use reason to do His miraculous will? I’ve never understood people’s objection to my faith in God’s ability to use them, even if they don’t know he’s doing it. On the other hand, when the hands-on medical types tell me they’ve seen a miracle, I believe them.
I want to add my thanks for the updates. I am not a Catholic or even a prayerful person, but I do recognize a miracle when I see one. No one can explain things like this and humans need explainations, why not just take the miracles as they come?
Thanks be to God in both cases. Prayers for the health of all particularly for the unborn baby.
Re: Faith. I will NEVER forget a story that I once read in Reader’s Digest that was about a little girl with the same diagnosis. She survived and showed of all the signs that little Faith is showing. After a year or more, it was discovered that the little girl had a lot of fluid in her skull that was compressing her brain almost flat against her skull. The fluid was drained and the brain was able to conform to its normal dimensions and shape. At the end of the story the little girl was living a normal life and possessed a normal intelligence.
Just like in Faith’s case, the mother had been counseled that her baby would die soon after birth. Then she had been told that it would be better to just let the baby go since she would never have any quality of life. Expert after expert examined the baby and did not see what was really going on. Cat scans revealed nothing. All proclaimed their astonishment with the final, correct diagnosis and even more amazement that the little girl had been not only able to live like that but also that she suffered no brain damage from it.
That little girl lived because her mother refused to give up on her and lose hope. Doctors do not know everything. What is impossible today, may be possible tomorrow and there is such a thing as miracles.
May Faith’s momma refuse to cave in to the experts and may she long be able to love her girl in the flesh no matter her quality of life!
You know, I don’t want to sound on the side of the people who would have aborted the anencephlic baby, because that’s not my decision, but everything you describe, right up to crying when uncomfortable, is a brain=stem or midbrain function. It doesn’t indicate any more consciousness than it does in a lizard.
God bless Faith and her mother. My youngest brother was anencephilic and my mom would have given anything to have these kinds of moments with him (he was stillborn). She insisted on holding him and she later described what he looked like to me, right down to his wide-open brown eyes which he inherited from my dad (the only one of four kids who had his eyes). She also told me that if she’d known what was going to happen to him(this was before ultrasounds were routine and we had no reason to suspect a problem until he stopped moving in the womb right around his due date), that she still would have chosen to carry him full-term and felt blessed to have had even that little bit of time with him.