Hi, I’m Libby. This is God’s story. I just happen to be part of it.
At the age of twelve, I started praying for my future husband and met him when I was thirty-four. I had a crush on him from the moment I saw him. He was helping at church where I served as Children’s Pastor in Mississippi.
That was January of 2011.
We became engaged in May. Married in July. Chad took a job in Texas that same year. We were quick to add two great kids to our family, EW and BW.
As my fortieth birthday approached, I decided to schedule a complete physical. Overall, I felt fine. A couple weeks before, I was talking to Chad as we were getting ready to go to bed. I told him it felt like something was kicking me in my left side when I put my head on the pillow.
I endured the physical, my blood work came back from the Lab fine, and the doctor said everything looked good. She told me I could get dressed, and as I slid off the table, I remembered the unusual sensation in my side.“Oh, by the way. For some reason, when I lay down, it feels like something is kicking me on my left side.” The doctor felt a bump, she told me she thought it might be an enlarged artery, and nothing medically could be done about it. But she’d like me to have a sonogram to cover all bases, and see what was going on.
The following Tuesday, I had the sonogram and went home to wait for the results
.
On Friday afternoon, I was in the kitchen fixing sandwiches for the kids lunch, when the phone rang. It was a voice I was not familiar with, the radiologist, he had found a large mass, 15 centimeters x 10 centimeters x 4 centimeters, and the spleen was enlarged. He continued on to say that it looked like Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Time froze. My heart skipped a beat. I stopped in the middle of spreading peanut butter. I saw my kids waiting for Mommy to finish with their lunch. Inside, I was ready to collapse, break down in tears, and scream.
My kids were under five. They needed their Mommy.
I had to compose myself. The radiologist continued on to that my PCP ordered an MRI the next day to verify the findings.
Seven days after the ultrasound, Chad and I walked into the oncologist's office. The news wasn’t good. He confirmed Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, stage 2A. We squeezed each others hands, looked into each other the eyes, and took deep breath to brace ourselves for what the next words out of the doctor’s mouth were going to be.
The doctor went on to explain it will be eight rounds of chemotherapy and that should do it. He said that this was a “good bad cancer” since it was treatable and survivable.