More than We Ask or Think

August 2006 I went into the urgent care at Arrowhead Community Hospital with a mysterious stomach pain. I thought it might be my appendix, and since I heard that you could die if your appendix bursts I thought I should have it looked at. My biggest apprehension at the time was that I did not have any health insurance. How would I pay for an appendectomy without insurance?
Worst Case Scenario
I got seen pretty quickly. They asked me a few questions, and before too long they ruled out appendicitis. The Intern there told me not to go jumping to the worst case scenario. I told him “I don’t even know what the worst case scenario would be.” He responded “Well the worst case scenario would be cancer.” At that moment I began thinking about the worst case scenario.

About two weeks later we got the news. I was in the follow up clinic with Kim and our one week old son Casey. The doctor asked us if anyone had told us the result of the biopsy yet. We said no and he proceeded to tell us that I did indeed have cancer. CANCER – that word hit us like a ton of bricks. What did this mean for us? Was I going to survive this? What was going to happen next? If I couldn’t pay for an appendectomy how would I pay for cancer treatment? I think that having little Casey in the room with us made the worries even more intense. Casey was going to need a father, and so were his older sister and brother. The doctor had left us alone in the room, he gave some other excuse, but I think he did it so Kim and I could talk to each other a little bit before he told us what would happen next.

What Happens Next?
The surgery was already scheduled and it was only 10 days away. One of the doctors explained that there was a good chance that they could get all of the cancer through surgery and if so I would not have to go through any chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

Well that was the first bit of good news, but there will be much more along the way. Kim, who was incredible through this whole ordeal, went to talk to the financial people at the hospital. I don’t know exactly when she did it, because I spent so much time in a hospital room between the biopsy and the surgery. She got information about MediCAL and we qualified for them to pay for both of my stays in the hospital, and the surgery! That was incredible. How did we qualify? Well first I had to have kids under the age of 18. That was easy. We just had our third. Secondly we had to qualify under income, and here to me was the first sign of God’s hand in all of this. About three months earlier my job had cut my hours by one day a week. So I was supporting a family on 80% of what I had been making. I was in the hospital four days one week for the biopsy, and missed three days the next week for the birth of Casey. All of those days I had to take off without pay. I thought it was terrible that I missed all of that pay. But in the end it helped us qualify for MediCAL. Looking back I am so thankful that God is in control of our circumstances. As I was going through it I didn’t always see how God was working.

Although Medical paid for the hospital and the surgery, it did not pay for our living expenses. I still went without pay for 12 days between the two hospital stays and Casey’s birth. However God was still working, and taking care of his child. Kim and I took our family to spend a day with Gary and Lisa Rogers and their family. We knew Gary and Lisa from church and they were also in our small group for a while. They had also invited another family over. The other family was the Kings. They were also a part of our small group from a year ago. I had a great time talking to people and watching our kids play that day. Kim and I mentioned the ordeal we were going through, but overall I thought it was a great time to take my mind off of cancer and hospitals.
Later that evening, we had a knock on our door. When we opened it we saw the Kings there. They told us that God had laid it on their hearts to give something to us. It was $500! Wow, we didn’t see that coming at all. We felt truly blessed. It was amazing to me that a family would give that much money to us.

The time leading up to the surgery was stressful. I had to take medicine to clear out my colon (it was colon cancer). The two days before my surgery I had to spend a lot of time in the bathroom. When I arrived at the Hospital for surgery on September 18, 2006 three of the Pastors from my Church were there: Pastor Scott, Pastor Dave, and Pastor Tim. I was impressed that they were there for me. Pastor Scott prayed with me and my family, but I don’t remember a word he said. I had a hard time concentrating.

Surgery
Surgery went well, and they thought they had removed all of the cancer. They also removed some lymph nodes to test to see if the cancer had spread. As it turned out . . . it did spread. I would have to go through chemotherapy to kill the rest of the cancer left in me, but first my body had to recover from surgery.
While I was recovering in the hospital, which was about 45 miles away from our house, Kim and the kids stayed with her parents in Redlands. That was a lot closer to the hospital. She was able to go back and forth to the Hospital much more quickly than if she had stayed at our house. Her Mom also helped with baby Casey, and her Dad drove Alina to school. Tom would get up early drive an hour to take Alina to school and then another 40 minutes back to his work.

As for me I couldn’t even get out of bed by myself. They cut through all of my stomach muscles; you know the ones you use to sit up. I was in a lot of pain, and they told me they wouldn’t release me until I had a bowel movement. Kim was hoping that I could be released by Sunday so that we could go home and she could take Alina to school for the next week. I wanted to go home too, but I didn’t know how to make the bowel movement come any faster. But finally it did come, and we did get to come home on Sunday.

That didn’t make Kim’s job any easier though. Besides driving Alina to school every day, she now had to take care of me (I still had a hard time getting out of bed), she had a one month old baby to take care of, and she also had Tommy at home who was only three at the time. I couldn’t have been very easy to deal with. I had about 15 staples down the middle of my stomach, and major dressing on top of it. Puss would ooze out form different parts along the incision, and I freaked out when I saw part of it open up. I thought there was a hole going all the way to my insides!
More of God’s Taking Care of Us
I couldn’t go back to work yet, so Kim arranged for us to get disability payments. However that only paid for about half of what were getting from my job. However, another family felt led to give to us. My Mom was working at a school with a lady named Sherri. I had taught Sherri’s kids at Inland Christian School about 15 years earlier. I had also played church softball with her husband Don for several years. When they heard about what I was going through they wrote us a check for several thousand dollars. I could not have imagined ever giving that much to someone, but God had blessed them with some extra money at that time and they wanted to help us out.

Eventually I got to the place where I could sit up, and I went back to work for a couple months until they started the chemotherapy. I was scheduled to start chemotherapy the week of Thanksgiving, but because of some complications they pushed it off one month. So it started the last week of December.

I really think of my cancer treatment in two parts: first was my surgery and recovery from September 21 to December 26 of 2006, and my chemotherapy which I think of as the first six months of 2007 (even though it really started the end of 2006). I will write more about my chemotherapy part in the next post.

Prayers
As I look back on surgery and recovery, I am amazed at all of the people that I had praying for me. My brother Andy’s church in Georgia was praying for me, and my brother Scott’s Christian school was praying for me in San Jose. The prayer group at my Mom’s school was praying for me. Staff members from at least two schools where I previously taught, Hesperia Christian School and Riverside Christian School, were praying for me. A short version of my story even ended up in a nationally (maybe internationally) distributed prayer list from Master Media.

I remember a conversation that I had with Kim’s sister Michelle where she said she wished that her and her husband Jon could be around to help out. They were in Korea at the time. I told her that I was happy that she had people praying for me at her church out there. I literally had people praying for me around the world! I am sure that I am leaving some groups out, and I am sure that there were some people who prayed for me that I was not even aware of. My point is that I was overwhelmed by the amount of prayers that were lifted up to God on my behalf.

Really it was prayers and answers to prayers. So many people helped out either physically or financially. Sometimes I would think of ways that God might solve my problems, but I usually think of just one way, but God worked through many different people. It kind of reminded me of the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” when so many people came to help to George Bailey at the end of the movie. I guess a better description of what happened is Ephesians 3:20-21

“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”