Written By My Dad...

My story is being shared on manninglive.com, and this was something my Daddy wrote in the comments. I thought it was really nice and wanted to share...


Thank you for supporting my daughter with your prayers and encouragement. While awaiting a scheduled biopsy on a swollen lymph node, my wife encouraged Whitney to keep an appointment she had previously made with her gynecologist. Her doctor found that her liver was enlarged and had a CT scan done that same afternoon. My wife and I waited anxiously for the result as we tended to the children. Whitney’s voice was strong as she explained she would need an immediate biopsy, but the words “numerous tumors” and “cancer” were too dreadful for her to utter without breaking down. We immediately called my mother-in-law to come watch the babies as we rushed to be with her so she would not have to drive home alone. We live about an hour away from her doctor’s office…actually, we live about an hour from everywhere. As you may imagine, my wife and I were crushed as we felt our daughter had been handed a death sentence. I had “googled” enough in the days since her supraclavicular lymph node had swollen to 3 cm’s to know what metastasis to the liver meant. We were almost to her doctor’s office when she called and said the surgeon had looked at the scan and thought it was lymphoma. Lymphoma has a high cure rate even in the 4th stage. What a relief! But even so, this brush with death had changed everything about how we looked at life…and death. So, the fight was on! We had hope from the doctors that this cancer could be beaten. That was Thursday. Then the call came late Tuesday evening that the pathologists were “puzzled”. It was not lymphoma. I took the call and I knew what the doctor was saying without him saying it. I quickly adopted his avoidance of certain words as I explained more “tests” were needed. Two days later the oncologist would lay it out in more certain language that left no hope for a cure…”months without chemo” and a not-very-convincing performance of “with chemo…years”. It was a knock out in round 1. Whitney had already lost 12 pounds in as many days and the all we could do was pray as she cried in pain. And I’ve found that mothers who have gone through child birth can take a lot of pain. The hydrocodone would have helped if she could have kept it down, but the cycle of nausea and vomiting would not allow her to keep any food down for long. The catch being you need to take the pain meds with food or you will get nausea and vomit….a cruel dilemma indeed. I took the next week off from work since she had a doctor’s appointment almost everyday for a port-a-cath implantation, brain MRI, upper and lower GI’s and her first round of chemo. And we crammed in an emergency room visit for a couple of IV’s in between as she was becoming dehydrated. It was during this week-specifically, after Tuesday’s brain MRI that I witnessed the fighter arise. The fight was back on! She took herself off the pain meds and faced the pain head on—pain that had ruled her life for weeks. Within 12 hours the pain was down from a “10” plus to a “5”. By the next evening it was gone. Round 1, Whitney. The nausea subsided as the pain meds lost their influence on her body. She was eating chic-filet–of all things this is her craving during this ordeal–on the same afternoon of her first chemo treatment. Then, the effects of the chemo threatened to take round 2. That’s when the gloves came off. Whitney was raised in a Christian home thanks to her mother, Ramona. She held up the family until I found, discovered, accepted, received, surrendered to salvation about 9 years ago..not sure what word fits. Perhaps, they all do. Whitney had been a Christian for years and I had witnessed the change in her life and her faith. But now I was witnessing a star being born. Not the Kristofferson/Streisand kind of star, but a star rising into a sky of stars that we look to in awe and wonder. We all have those stars in our lives as God displays His love, hope, and power through those who take hold of faith and shine through the night to a world that has too quickly forgotten to simply look up. Whitney is my star. I will always look up. Thank you again for sharing her story.