Here are Donna’s reflections on her surgery yesterday…

Would you like to know what God did in answer to the prayers of the saints yesterday, the day of my breast cancer surgery? This is long, so if it is TL:DR (too long: don’t read) for you, the short answer to that question is: A LOT.

WHAT GOD DID

The Perfect Psalm for Someone Going Into Surgery

It “just so happened” that my Psalms for the day were 117 and 118. Psalm 117 is that short but sweet one, only two powerful verses: Praise the Lord, all you nations.
    Praise him, all you people of the earth.
For his unfailing love for us is powerful;
    the Lord’s faithfulness endures forever.

Can’t argue with those promises!

Psalm 118 should be sub-titled as “The Perfect Psalm for Someone Going Into Surgery.” Here are some highlights and my reactions in parentheses.

¹ Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!
    His faithful love endures forever.

² Let all Israel repeat:
    “His faithful love endures forever.”
³ Let Aaron’s descendants, the priests, repeat:
    “His faithful love endures forever.”
⁴ Let all who fear the Lord repeat:
    “His faithful love endures forever.”

(I think the Lord wants to emphasize something here, like, perhaps, His faithful love endures forever!)

⁵ In my distress I prayed to the Lord,
    and the Lord answered me and set me free.
⁶ The Lord is for me, so I will have no fear.
    What can mere people do to me?
⁷ Yes, the Lord is for me; he will help me.

(I’m having a bit of a pride issue here with the “distress” part. My cancer is very small, very early stage, I have excellent medical care, and so on. I have three dear long-time friends who are struggling right now with much more serious health issues than mine. I have other dear long-time friends who have gone through much more serious breast cancer journeys. I feel like I shouldn’t be worried or distressed. And most of the time I’m not, but sometimes fears rise up. And that part about what can mere people do to me? Well, they can poke me and prod me and stick needles in me and compress me into uncomfortable machines and put potentially dangerous drugs into my veins and cut me open and … you get the gist. So to be reassured that the Lord is for me and he will help me was just plain wonderful!)

¹⁵ Songs of joy and victory are sung in the camp of the godly.
    The strong right arm of the Lord has done glorious things!
¹⁶ The strong right arm of the Lord is raised in triumph.
    The strong right arm of the Lord has done glorious things!

(I was reading this Psalm to Bill on our way to the hospital via my newly installed Bible app, The Bible Hub. Side note – I don’t know why I hadn’t put a Bible app on my phone until recently. I love this one. Easy to use, lots of versions to compare, and plenty of other features. Highly recommend if you are poky like me and haven’t downloaded a Bible app yet. Back to the verses. I had to laugh out loud reading them. God really wanted me to get that picture of his strong right arm! Three times in two verses. Okay, okay, I get it.)

¹⁷ I will not die; instead, I will live
    to tell what the Lord has done.

(Busted! How did the Lord know that I had entertained the thought I could die? Remember, early stage, very small, excellent care? But part of that excellent care was having me watch a series of videos to prepare me. When one of the videos talked about going under general anesthesia, it did manage to mention that some things can go wrong, and one of them is that you could die! I hadn’t really considered that. Oh, boy, one more thing to fear. Sheesh. Well, apparently, I didn’t die, so here I am living to tell what the Lord has done!)

²⁴ This is the day the Lord has made.
    We will rejoice and be glad in it.

(Really? God makes surgery days? I laughed when I saw this one, too. I used to remind myself that God knows all my days when I would be sick on Palawan. He knew my malaria days, and He knew my dengue fever days. Today is a surgery day, and He made it, so I need to rejoice and be glad in it!)

²⁸ You are my God, and I will praise you!
    You are my God, and I will exalt you!

²⁹ Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!
    His faithful love endures forever.

(There are other great verses in this Psalm, including some Messianic prophecies. But these are the last two verses and they sum up the theme – the Lord is good and his faithful love endures forever. But just in case I couldn’t really absorb that, He sent me a sign ->)

Celestial Signs

I’m going to admit something. I have a special relationship with the moon. I don’t worship it, but I worship the One who created it and keeps it in the sky. It started back a few years ago when we were going through a contentious presidential election. One night, after a particularly disheartening event in that pre-election cycle, I was full of despair. I remember looking out our back window and seeing the full moon shining in all its glory. It was huge and bright and beautiful. And I thought about the moon – how many elections it had shone over, how many wars, how many millennia of world events good, bad, and ugly. And suddenly it all came into perspective for me. Yes, this was a messy time for the United States. But the US is less than 250 years old. This isn’t the end of the world yet. No matter what happens, God is still alive, still working, still reaching out to His broken world. And later I came across the verse in Psalms where God says just that. The context is talking about the dynasty of King David:

“…It will be as eternal as the moon,
    my faithful witness in the sky!”

Psalm 89:37

Well, there “just happens” to be a full moon going on right now. And it’s not setting until after dawn at this time of year. So that gorgeous full moon was in our view all the way to the hospital early yesterday morning. A symbol to me, very vibrant, very personal, of God’s faithfulness.

God put that gorgeous moon up there to remind us nightly of His faithfulness. On a side note, the moon is really useful, too. We don’t need it too much in our modern culture, but the Palawanos take advantage of the different moon phases. Full moon is great for doing work at night when it’s really hot during the day. Before we had a lawnmower, they used to clear our airstrip with their machetes under the full moon and make a party out of it. New moon they use for low-tide fishing. They hike out to the coast and spend the night there. They shine their torches or flashlights over the water and the fish are drawn to them when it’s otherwise dark.

My Beloved Bill

I’ll admit something else here. I’ve got the most fantastic husband. I don’t like to brag, because I don’t want you all to get jealous or convicted, but he is just the best. He loves taking care of me. And he’s a gourmet cook. He didn’t complain when my surgery arrival time got scheduled at 7 am, which meant leaving the house at around 6:30 am, which meant getting up at 5 am. And a day or two before, he pleaded with me, made me promise, to let him take care of me. I’m not always good at that. But I promised this time. I came home from the hospital to a bouquet of red roses and a bouquet of get well balloons that he’d hidden in the garage, then snuck into the house while I was getting into the car before heading out yesterday. And my job for the next few days is to focus on rest. I love him!

No Fainting

Here’s one I’m really thankful for. I’ve told several of you at church and in our home fellowship that I have a problem with fainting. It happened during pre-op when I broke my wrist almost two years ago and messed up the surgery time while they had to get me stabilized again. It happened during my breast MRI and the MRI had to be stopped early. I was so afraid it would happen again yesterday. But thank you, Lord! I didn’t faint yesterday. And thank you for your prayers whether you knew to pray specifically for that or not.

A Droll Distraction

One of the things that helped me weather that scary-looking clinical pre-op room with all its needles and machines and equipment and hospital smells was reading a great book. The day before the surgery my special long-term friend Anita was texting me back and forth from Colorado Springs. She’s one who had a more serious cancer surgery and treatment, so she’s been through it. She suggested I bring along some light reading for the long pre-op period. So the night before I loaded up my Kindle, adding seven books in a variety of genres. Yesterday morning the one I choose was a Dave Barry book, Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog. The grizzled muzzle on the dog on the cover reminded me of Anita’s recently departed old Murphy. Bill and I are Dave Barry fans from way back. This book didn’t disappoint, in fact, this time he was vulnerable as well as funny. Laughing and smiling from the first paragraph, time passed quickly, and I could ignore all the scary medical stuff around me. Here’s a part of the book’s description:

As Dave Barry turns seventy—not happily—he realizes that his dog, Lucy, is dealing with old age far better than he is. She has more friends, fewer worries, and way more fun. So Dave decides to figure out how Lucy manages to stay so happy, to see if he can make his own life happier by doing the things she does (except for drinking from the toilet).

Head’s up for those in San Diego County, if you don’t already know about this – you can check out e-books from the San Diego County Library straight onto your Kindle. For some reason, the San Diego City Library doesn’t work the same way. Maybe you geniuses know how to do it, but I haven’t figured it out. The San Diego County Library, on the other hand, makes it easy. Just need to get a library card, then off you go to sdcl.org. You’re welcome!

And Then I Was Out for the Count

This part is where we’ll have to wait to hear the answers to what God was doing. I was unconscious. The reports from the care team is that it went well. But no details are available until my follow-up appointment with my surgeon in ten days or so when she’ll go over the results, and the pathology reports will be available then. So it’s like the curtain closed here for a bit, but then the curtain started opening again in the recovery room.

Spacey Scene Between Two Worlds

This is a Tale of Two Cities: Recovery Room Version. At some point yesterday I started realizing I was waking up from the anesthesia. There’s a period of time where one goes sort of in and out of consciousness. And during that time, I remembered another time where I was in that same spacey state. It was back in June of 1981.

We’d arrived in Manila only a few weeks before and were staying at our mission guest home. Bill had flown down to Palawan, to see the island for the first time, and meet some of the Palawano people for the first time, as we’d just recently learned there was a possibility that language group needed a New Testament translation.

While he was gone, I stared miscarrying. This was my fifth miscarriage. An ob/gyn doctor across town was highly recommended to me, so off I went. But I had to leave little Elisa, age 2 ½, with a family who we’d just met, get in a taxi by myself and go to the hospital where the doctor’s office was. He put me right into surgery for a D&C. Bill wasn’t scheduled to come back to Manila until Sunday, and this was Friday.

Post-op, as I was in that spacey world between consciousness and unconsciousness, all of a sudden, there was Bill, leaning over my bed in the recovery room. I’ll never forget it. I’m sort of in dreamland and he was so excited about all he’d just experienced. He was talking about the tiny fabric-covered plane, a grass airstrip going straight up a hill, Palawanos seeming to just appear out of the jungle to meet the plane. He was as enthusiastic as I’d ever seen him. I just knew this was it. The place he was talking about was where we were going to be heading after all those years of training.

As I was in that spacey state again yesterday, I felt like I’d come full circle, from that naïve young missionary just starting out, to forty years later seeing the children of the children we knew becoming leaders in the Palawano church, using the New Testament God helped us complete.

There are a lot more chapters to this part of the story, but I’ll leave it there for now.

But two more things… First, that family we’d just met who were taking care of my little girl? Their names were Jody and Barb Crain. They worked on Palawan, too, in the Tagbanwa tribe. Jody and Bill have worked together on many projects over the years and now they are working together on the CLA Development team. Jody is Bill’s good friend and his right hand man. Their gifts are really different, but they complement each other so well. We never would have guessed back then where we’d be 42 years later.

And second, that lovely ob/gyn in Manila was named Dr. Del Rosario. He took an interest in my case and said, “We’re going to get to the bottom of why you are having all these miscarriages.” He was the first doctor to really care. I had to go to the Philippines to meet him! So the next time I got pregnant, I went to see him and he walked me through what was a kind of tough pregnancy, where I almost miscarried again, and had to be really, really careful at the end. But that pregnancy went through, and in January of 1983 the world welcomed Bethy! For some miraculous reason, the pregnancy with Elisa was problem free, even though it was between miscarriages two and three. God is good and both our amazing daughters are miracles.

So when the recovery room nurse came in and asked me how I was doing, I told her I’d just been seeing the Philippines and palm trees in my mind.

The Nurse Who’d Been to Palawan

And of all things, that nurse had visited Palawan! And she wasn’t even a Filipina. We had a nice little chat about the Philippines. She asked what we were doing in the Philippines, so of course we told her. Bill came into the recovery room at that point. He said I repeated myself a few times, so I guess the anesthesia wasn’t fully out of my system yet. And sadly, I don’t remember the nurse’s name. But it was so much fun to talk about Palawan and the Philippines. Who would have anticipated that?

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

Pretty soon I was sent home. I’m not in too much pain and being well cared for by the aforementioned sweet husband.

So thank you to all who sent prayers and expressions of care! God took good care of me with the help of skilled doctors, nurses, anesthesiologist, a friend who recommended light reading, a gorgeous full moon, His precious Word, and my amazing husband.

Yesterday was a really good day!

_{Image by István Mihály from Pixabay}