I Am A Zebra

 

Often medical students are told that when they hear hoofbeats, assume it's a horse.  In other words, look for the simplest answer first.  Zebras in the medical world are diseases and conditions that don't fit the "horse" answers, they are rare.  I'm a Zebra. 

In September 2003, I went to a conference on prayer where the moderator of the conference said, "If you don't have a consistent habit of prayer, when the events come along that turn your world upside down, you won't have the reserves to draw on."  In October 2003, I went to the doctor for a routine visit.  I complained about indigestion that she thought was just gall stones.  It wasn't.  She scheduled me for an ultrasound that started at my spleen and made its way over to my liver.  The technician hadn't even gotten to the gall bladder yet when he left his chair and got a white-coated doctor to come take a look.  The events had just happened that turned my world upside down.  They found a mass in my liver that from the looks of things had been there for a while. From that day forward, my life has been different.  

I spent a week reeling between tests, emotional highs and lows, and a few sleepless nights. My doctor called at one point and said, "It's okay to cry."  Oh, and my daughter was a senior in high school and I was ordering cap, gown, invitations, etc. during that week.  And in the meantime she had been without her voice for almost a year and was working with a speech therapist to get it back in working order. 

On one of those sleepless nights, I heard a whisper in my ear (and it wasn't my husband, Kevin.  He doesn't whisper--he snores!!!!) saying the same thing over and over again, "I will keep you in perfect peace." I finally fell asleep to that continuous whisper. When I woke up the next morning, I got out my Strong's Exhausting Concordance and looked it up.  It was there, Isaiah 26:3--You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. That has been my mainstay for all of the years following those events. Two weeks after that fateful day when they found the mass, I had my official diagnosis:  Neuroendocrine cancer consistent with Carcinoid Syndrome. This cancer is a 1/3000 cancer diagnosis. It's one of the Zebras of the cancer world. Therefore, I am a Zebra.