No Evidence of Disease

After chronicling my cancer battle for the last eight months, maybe it’s a little ironic that this is one of the most difficult blog posts for me to write.

Yesterday I received the results from my third PET scan, and there is No Evidence of Disease. I am in remission.

I had lots of immediate thoughts. Among others: Hallelujah…Thank you, God…Time to celebrate…and Wow.

I’m DONE WITH LUMPY.

I don’t have the proper words to thank God for leading me into this storm and guiding me back to a safe and healthy harbor—feeling more loved, more grateful, and more compassionate for having taken the journey. I am blessed beyond measure.

I don’t have the proper words to thank the people—family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers—who took the time to wish me well, say a prayer, send me cards, make me food, knit me a blanket, light me a candle or otherwise support me. Their example has lit a fire within me to somehow pay this forward to those in my life who are in need. I am blessed beyond measure.

I don’t have the proper words to thank my wife for boldly stepping up to face a challenge that few couples encounter just four months after they eat their wedding cake. Day after day for the past eight months, she personified the marital vows she so recently agreed to. This trial and her self-giving, sacrificial response have made our marriage stronger than it ever possibly could have been if our first year as husband and wife had been smooth sailing. I am blessed beyond measure.

I don’t have the proper words to describe how so much good can come from something so seemingly bad, so I’m going to borrow words from J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen Colbert. In a recent interview, the Catholic comedian quoted Tolkien when talking about how he coped with the tragic death of his father and two brothers as a child. Reflecting on the purpose of something as seemingly awful as death, Tolkien wrote, “What punishments of God are not gifts?” Colbert expounded on this, saying,

“So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

Colbert’s line has been stuck in my head since I read it last week, and it bears repeating, since it’s incredibly appropriate given the last eight months of my life: “It would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude.” It makes me think back to my diagnosis. Was I grateful? Nah. Accepting? Eventually. But even my acceptance and understanding of why this had to happen to me has evolved significantly. I think my feelings are summed up rather perfectly by another favorite Catholic of mine, Fr. Robert Barron, who also found wisdom in Colbert’s interview and added a deeper layer to it:

“One of the most potent insights of the spiritual masters is that our lives are not about us, that they are, in fact, ingredient in God’s providential purposes, part of a story that stretches infinitely beyond what we can immediately grasp. Why are we suffering now? Well, it might be so that, in St. Paul’s language, we might comfort someone else with the same consolation we have received in our suffering.”

Blogging about my experience has been a great consolation to me on so many levels, and it makes my heart soar to hear that my oversharing of my experience has inspired others in some way or been informative to fellow cancer patients or made someone think or made someone laugh or made someone pray.

My treatment is over and the cancer is gone, but I want to keep driving the consolation train for those in my life. As I’ve previously mentioned, I have been blessed with an army of people who, by their example, have co-authored a manual on How To Respond. Browse my previous posts and you too will be overwhelmed by the simple (and not so simple!) gestures of support that helped me to endure countless hospital visits, incessant needles, annoying hospital stays, bouts of Chemo Chrappiness™ and more. Make no mistake, if I seemed optimistic and positive during these trials, most of that stemmed from the overwhelming power of my support and not my own indomitable spirit.

I firmly believe that it was God’s plan for my life that I should go through this experience at exactly this moment and under these exact circumstances. Of course this means that it was also God’s will for me to get the “good kind of cancer” and live through the experience, when so many others were not so lucky.One tangible way this experience has changed me forever is that I am no longer capable of praying without offering one up for everyone who has or had cancer, living or dead. I’ve become so much more aware of this insidious disease and the havoc it’s wreaking somewhere every day–complicating lives or ending them too soon. While I trust that their deaths are as much a part of God’s plan as my survival, it doesn’t make it any easier to absorb. And it definitely makes Colbert and Tolkien’s gratitude more difficult to muster.

But here I am. I am alive. I am healthy. I am blessed beyond measure with gifts and talents and family and friends. I don’t know what God has in store for me, but I know it must be something special, and I stand ready to trust in the next stage of His plan.