Leukemia: In His Hands (part 1)

On January 12 my Mama was diagnosed with an advanced form of leukemia. The prognosis was blunt and harsh; the doctor laid it out and left the room. Entering a state of shock, my mom turned to my dad and to her sister and said, “I feel like this is a dream.”

We sat by our phones all that day and into the night, my siblings and I – waiting for the call. It had all been so fast: a bit of nausea around Christmas. A bit of tiredness. A sense of something not right. A blood test that showed a white blood cell count approaching zero. A five a.m. phone call. A bone marrow test that revealed nothing. And then a week in which we assumed she was regaining strength.

But on January 12, the oncologist’s office called – “your bone marrow DNA shows a chromosome 16 inversion. Come in immediately.”

Mama called each of us one by one, saying as she did that she knew if she didn’t call we’d all be playing phone tag before long – myself, my siblings, my aunts. She didn’t say what chromosome 16 inversion could mean, but her voice told me anyway.  She told me not to worry, that God was in control, to discipline my thoughts toward faith, and I argued a little, put off because I wasn’t actually afraid – I didn’t know enough to worry, was only relieved that maybe they finally knew what was wrong with her body and could make it right. But as I listened to her my stomach sank: I know my mama, and I knew by her voice that much was at stake. I understood that the experience in her heart and mind was immense. She always knows. She’s always right. She is like a prophetess, sensing or knowing what will happen before it takes place (which can make a daughter crazy sometimes – try keeping secrets from a mother who has dreams about All The Things you try to hide!), and the amount of self-control she was practicing, the amount of faith she was speaking, told me that she knew something in spirit even if she didn’t yet know it in words.

So I did exactly what one should never do. I googled. I skimmed and read and understood: if she’d heard the doctor correctly, leukemia was the diagnosis. I saw a typical prognosis and shut my computer to keep from seeing more. And then I waited. I made macaroni and cheese – a mom’s go-to dinner for moments of crisis, you know – I made macaroni and cheese for six hungry kids, stirred it shaking, stirred it crying, stirred it waiting.  Not afraid, but knowing; deeply, deeply knowing. My sister-in-law and I grounded each other while we each cooked dinner – a phone call across the continent to keep our minds both focused and distracted in all the right ways.

At five o’clock Oklahoma time, fear landed. I turned to my husband while feelings flooded, turned and said “I feel afraid,” and as the words left my mouth a song began to play loudly in the next room over. We looked at each other. I walked to my room to find my phone, turned off and set to silent, with Casting Crowns’ Glorious Day blaring from its tiny speaker. It was a tiny miracle – no one had touched it. No one had turned it on. No one had been in the room. The song hadn’t been played for at least a year, the album was not on any playlist, the music app was not open. Later when I swiped the phone to open it, as I shifted through screens to find my iTunes, the player opened to an entirely different genre and an entirely different (paused) song.

But I didn’t need to know all this. As I walked to my room and saw the blank, black screen of the untouched phone, laughter filled me, a crazy joy, a crazy sense of being seen, of being known, of being loved. I knew the miracle. The Holy Spirit met me in the deepest way, and when I would tell my mom, the Spirit would meet her. The song played one time through, and then fell silent, and my heart heard:

“I see you, I know you, I love you. I see her, I know her, I love her. I see, I know, I love. I am with you. I am with her. I am here. I’ve got this.”

Let me tell you that the timing, the exact moment the song began, was the moment the doctor sat himself across from my mom in the Room of Life-Changing News. It was the moment the diagnosis left his lips. It was the moment all things temporal shifted into focus, the moment death was for the first time looked upon, the moment my mom found herself in what felt like could only be a dream. The worship began the moment Fear made his debut.

But God.

God cleared the stage.

Sweeping Fear and all his accomplices out of the way, Jesus established himself in the midst of praise.

“I’ve got this. I’m here. She’s in my hands.”

I lifted my own hands and worshipped.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory in the heavens.

Through the PRAISE of children and infants

you have established a stronghold against your enemies,

to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels

and crowned them with glory and honor.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands;

you put everything under their feet:

all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild,

the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea,

all that swim the paths of the seas.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

(Psalm 8)