faith over fear

When the doctor calls with test results but doesn’t want to tell you over the phone, you know it’s not a good thing!  That’s what happened to me in the summer of 2023. I had not been feeling normal since fall, but it wasn’t until early spring that my Dr. started sending me for tests to investigate my symptoms. Five years earlier I had been through two surgeries to remove two different types of cancerous tumors, so you can imagine the thoughts running through my head as I hung up the phone.  

If there is one thing I learned five years ago, as I went through all the tests, biopsies, and surgeries, it’s that you have to really guard your mind from heading down the wrong thought process when it comes to these trials.  You can either choose to believe or choose to doubt, and being a believer in God as my higher power, I chose to believe. My motto five years ago was “The Bigger the Trial, The Bigger the Victory!” And that’s what I kept telling myself every day.

Fast forward to this year, I found myself sitting in the cancer ward with an Oncologist telling me that this time the cancer had spread to my lung, and that I would need to have chemotherapy.   Words like cancer, oncology and chemotherapy are in a category of their own, and somehow they are always partnered up with fear, worry and helplessness.  Getting bad news can honestly shake you to the core, and weaken you physically, emotionally and mentally, and I’m not gonna say that I wasn’t shaken by the news.  But what happened next in my mind would make a huge difference in my entire life moving forward.