EXCERPT: What I learned about God the day I almost died

(RNS) EXCERPT: How do you go back to the treatment that promises to be more painful and unpredictable than the last?

(The following excerpt from Fight Back With Joy by Margaret Feinberg was used by permission of the author and publisher. Copyright Worthy Publishing, 2015.)

What I Learned About God The Day I Almost Died

Fear.


The villain strangled me as the cancer set in.

I shook with the emotion knowing what the sickness would do to me. The moon-shaped face and jaundiced complexion that I would see in the morning mirror. The disappearing eyebrows and the way children would stare at me in the produce section.

Chemotherapy was hailed as the most promising weapon against my form of breast cancer. After a long wait, a nurse entered the hospital room in a Hazmat-like suit to administer the poisonous chemicals. Minutes later, pain crept along my lower back. Must be the hospital bed. I rolled over onto one side and then the other. The cramp spread around to my chest. Something tickled my throat then throbbed in my lungs. Cough. Cough. I glanced down. Was the skin on my arms turning pinkish-red?

Everything blurred.

The straining chest pain began to squeeze the life out of me. I could see light but my eyes begged for closure. Hold on, Margaret. Help will come.

With a click-whoosh, hospital staff rushed in. One nurse slapped the “off” button on the IV drip while another injected me with steroids to prevent my throat from closing and stop the heart attack.

The coughing slowed, the pain receded, and I regained full consciousness. To my horror, the treatment marched on. Eight hours later I returned home woozy and weary. Whenever I closed my eyes, snapshots of the nurse lunging for the button replayed again and again. I curled into a sickle and sobbed.

A blinked and the next treatment arrived. The first minute of the drip. All clear. Then the second. My chest wound up in a vice. I hacked for air. The nurse’s hand slammed the off button. The nightmare scene had returned to haunt me.

The staff didn’t rush in like before. A lone doctor appeared in the doorway. After a quick exam, he announced, “You can go home. This is too life threatening to continue.”

That’s when I learned the only thing worse than being in chemotherapy is flunking out.


For the next five days, I sat on standby with a hospital to-go bag waiting for insurance to approve an experimental drug. That’s when I realized the one sermon no one had ever given me in all my years of church attendance:

“How do you go back?”

How do you go back to the treatment that promises to be more painful and unpredictable than the last? How do you go back to the loveless marriage, the toxic workplace, the empty bed or the lonesome nursing home? What do you do when the only way forward requires you to go back?

For me, time mattered. Each passing day the cancer could reboot and start growing again. Whenever the phone rang, I froze panicky, then darted to answer. One evening, long after doctor’s office had closed, I received the call.

“Insurance approved,” she said. “Be here first thing tomorrow.”

The next morning, I took a leap of faith and trusted God to provide what I did not have. My joy reserves were at an all-time low, but if I offered them to God, perhaps like fishes and loaves, he could grant me a full belly and feed 4,999 others at the same time.

I swung by the local party store on my way to the infusion center. My right hand clutched a bundle of red balloons. Intent on passing out these helium-filled gifts, I approached the long corridor of chairs filled with infusion patients.

A frail woman occupied the first chair. I estimated she was in her sixties, matted silver hair and sunken eyes, but an inviting countenance.


“My name is Margaret, and I’ve had a really difficult time in treatment. I’m in the fight of my life,” I declared. “I don’t want to be here today, and I bet you don’t either. I want to give you this red balloon in hope that it would bring you joy.”

The woman’s thin lips curled upward as she extended her arm: “I’d like that.”

Turning to the man next to her, I repeated my offer, but with a different result.

“Not now,” he said with bone-tiredness, “but thank you very much.”

I approached the woman across from him, since I was having more luck with female patients.

“I don’t need a balloon, but I do need a hug,” she preempted.

I reached down and wrapped my arms around her neck, knowing that we shared so much more in common than geography. The man who rejected my balloon cleared his throat, interrupting our moment.

“Wait,” he protested. “I didn’t know you were giving away free hugs.”

I walked over to offer him affection too.

One by one, I shuffled my way down the row, introducing myself and handing out balloons for nearly an hour. Some accepted with little more than a nod. One rejected my gift without even the courtesy of eye contact. A few took time to share their stories with me and listen to part of mine.

When I walked into the hospital that day, there was no bluegrass emerging from within my heart, no scent of tulips wafting from my soul. Yet somehow, somewhere along the way, the Great Joy Giver filled me with an unmistakable sense of blessedness and gratitude. As my balloon bouquet shrank to nothing, God filled me, lifted me, and refocused my attention outward and upward.


Joy is a gift we can offer even when we don’t possess it ourselves. When we do, something mysterious happens. Joy wins.

Like me, the day you need joy most may be the one you want to offer it the least. Give anyway and give generously.

Slip a surly store clerk a kind word of thanks. Give that friend who’s always down on herself a compliment. Flash a smile to strangers who seem to be having a hard day. A handful of fresh daisies. Some dark chocolates. A five-second hug. Then wait to see what kind of fruit these seeds of joy bear.

By the time I finished handing out the red balloons, I had been inflated with just enough courage to go back and take my seat for the next treatment.

YS END FEINBERG

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