A surprise refrain

Saturday was one of those days. I drove Debbie to the airport for a weekend speaking engagement in Los Angeles. Then I returned home, created the blogspot, and started to work with Jesse on our "redemption house". It seems I managed about a half hour of work on the top of the parapet roof scraping the paint off the metal cornice molding when Jesse tried to talk to me about the paint scheme. I stared at him rather absently. He decided to come to the roof top and check me out--only to find that I was somewhat stuck on the edge of the roof and was disoriented. Disoriented enough to not know the year, the month, the president, or what I had been doing when so asked in my trip to the ER. An ECG, blood tests, admission, holter monitor, MRI and EEG and by Monday (today) I am home. The diagnosis was something like, "global transitory amnesia". OK, so I didn't know where I was, or what I was doing--but that shouldn't be SO abnormal for me is it?

Yes. Even for me. We don't know the cause yet, and we await the results of the EEG. But so far the results are that there is no "structural" problem--no TIA or stroke or such. Possibly some form of a seizure, and if not then it will be hard to know the cause.

As I was being released Debbie was finishing her mamogram and getting ready for her MRI. The mamogram came back clear. Pagets disease is most often accompanied by an invasive cancer, and at this point it looks like she is clear of any other invasive presence, so we are thankful for that. Tuesday we meet with a plastic surgeon to understand the issues in reconstruction better. I will be with her rather than on the roof or in a hospital bed myself.

Monday, April 1 we go for mamogram and MRI and then to a plastic surgeon to discuss the options. With Paget's the mamogram is not particularly helpful unless the diagnosis is known, which it is now. The MRI can be "focused" according to the Mamogram, so the imaging results should tell us if there is underlying invasive cancer, or if the extent of the cancer is in the ducts still.

Those are the facts...we are dealing with it, and the SongWriter is dealing with us in His love.

LifeSong

It’s three o’clock in the morning. In Papua, eastern Indonesia, where I was just two weeks days ago, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. I guess perspective and location make a difference in life.

Six days ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer—an extremely rare form—Paget’s disease of the breast. Like a good professional nurse, I have listened carefully to doctor and nurse’s explanations and peppered them with questions, researched the web about Paget’s, and gave careful and thorough explanations to my family, concerned coworkers at World Relief, my friends at Faith Community Fellowship and Mission to the World. Disclosure, openness, honesty, transparency are what we promote in the HIV and AIDS ministries that I lead. It can be no less with this, I tell people. I have nothing to hide. Inside, I wonder what other parallels there are with the disease of AIDS that I have embraced for thirty years.

But inside, I am hiding something. I cry and wrestle with sleepless nights. After work, I sit down to the piano to practice for the lessons I resumed a year ago after a forty year hiatus. My fingers curl through the A flat and E flat scales with a vengeance. Somehow, the minor scales seem major to me now.

I agonize over why I have to go through this. As a young nursing student many years ago at Columbia University in New York, I watched from the surgery galleys as the blob of breasts of women undergoing mastectomies were scooped from their chest walls and bagged for pathology. I was often the first face the same women looked up at as I hovered over their beds in my crisp pin-stripped student’s uniform when the bliss of anesthesia gave way to the stark reality that it was gone. “Yes. It’s gone.” I would say, as they pushed their free hand all over their grossly uneven chest wall. “We had to take your breast because of cancer. I am so sorry.”

Perhaps every nursing student imagines sometime, somewhere in the stacks of medical libraries or the surgery bleachers, “What if it were me?” I pressed the question to my fiancée at the time—Karl. “What if it were me? If I have a mastectomy someday, will you still love me? Will you still want me?” Perhaps few men know how to answer that question weeks before their debut to the wonder and beauty of sexual love in marriage.

Tonight, I have more questions.

God, isn’t it enough that I survived the trauma of Anna Strikwerda’s murder in Eritrea and my own kidnapping of twenty-six days along with my unborn child?

God, isn’t it enough that I and two of my three children and one of my grandchildren have a life-threatening, congenital heart condition that prompts the reminder that even a simple heart flutter can mean a sudden and complete heart failure?

God, how is it that the marvelous mechanisms you designed to pull a husband and wife together in the ecstasy of love, poignantly described in the Song of Songs in the Bible and the very vehicle you created to nurture newborns and first year infants somehow become a death trap? I just learned this week, that not just one or two milk ducts but ten to fifteen different ones all converge to ensure life for a new life. How did it suddenly happen that they are now pathways of destruction?

So God, do you love me? What Song of Songs applies to me today?

Karl did have an answer for me thirty-seven years ago when I questioned his yet-to-be-quickened love for me. “Of course, of course, I will love you—always.” He has strengthened those words with years of deep bonding and constant reassurance these last weeks that nothing, nothing has changed in his love to me. When he learned the biopsy results, he took the next plane home from Manila, leaving only several days ahead of schedule. Yes, he meant what he said thirty-seven years ago.

Today, while banging piano keys and fruitlessly tumbling around in bed seeking sleep, another question surfaces. This one I’m learning to answer in a deeper, major/minor sort of way. Perhaps a bit like scale practices—keeping on until the fingering is right, the discipline routine, the finger-memory secure, the sound pure, the application for the Performance ready.

God has already told me multiple ways in his Word and in my life, that He does love me. That He will always be with me. Just now, I think he is telling me I have the question backwards. It’s not about whether or not he loves me. It’s a question about how much I love him.

Lord, you are my Song of Songs. And Lord, I have some scale practicing I need to do.

Debbie
March 28, 2008