Unhitching from the Crazy Train by Julie Sparkman

Author:Julie Sparkman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: New Hope Publishers
Published: 2017-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

My actions could not have rewritten God’s story . . . I’m not that important. None of us is.

This was a lesson I had to learn on a much larger scale during a particularly dark time in my life, a season in which my faith could have been destroyed if I had not come to grips with the difference between role and responsibility. It was fall 2012, and I was enjoying a life that was pretty close to my picture. My counseling partner and I had just opened a counseling ministry. I was in the middle of teaching a Bible study that was being filmed for nationwide distribution. My son had graduated from college and was pursuing his career in California. My husband loved his job. My daughters were doing well in school. Everything was on track.

Then one day, out of the blue, reality took a sharp detour further away from my picture than I had ever experienced.

It began with a phone call from my son. He had noticed a lump growing under his arm and decided to get it checked out. He called to say his doctor was sending him for an immediate ultrasound. My world started to tilt. My picture started to shake. Two days and many tests later, my picture was shattered completely with his diagnosis of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Our family was thrust into a world of huge decisions and a new cancer language we neither spoke nor understood. A well-meaning friend who was a cancer survivor said, “You have to get him treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. They have the cutting-edge technology he needs.” This would have been good advice if his insurance had been accepted at Cedars-Sinai, but it wasn’t; only the smaller hospital nearby would cover his treatment. Fueled by my belief that my son’s treatment would determine his outcome, the voices in my head were deafening: “A good mother would do whatever she had to do to secure the absolute best care for her child. Mortgage her house. Sell her hair. Sell her blood. Whatever it takes.”

Somehow, in the fog of cancer war, saving my son’s life became my responsibility.

We consulted with two oncologists who both confirmed my son’s treatment was standard, and he would get the same treatment no matter which hospital he went to. We arranged for him to be treated at the smaller hospital that took his insurance. The night before my son was scheduled to begin chemo, he got a phone call from his doctor.

“Listen, I didn’t feel completely comfortable with your pathology report, so I sent your scans to a lymphoma specialist. You don’t actually have lymphoma B. This doctor confirmed you actually have Burkitt’s lymphoma, a cancer so rare and dangerous that we can’t treat you here. We need to completely change your treatment plan and send you to Cedars-Sinai.”

Had this error not been caught, my son’s cancer would have responded to the original treatment very quickly because that is what Burkitt’s does. However, it probably would have returned with a vengeance in his brain and spine.

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