One morning I was in bed, watching the morning news. This young woman with terminal brain cancer was planning on moving to WA from CA so that she could die with dignity. Fast forward to +2 years where I'm, again, watching the morning news where the news anchor is announcing her temporary leave so she can spend time with her husband during his last days as he had succumbed to brain cancer. Not to mention the other two brain cancer cases sometime during that timespan, one being an acquaintance. At the time, they were meaningless events to me. Of course, it saddened me, but it was irrelevant to my life and I mostly thought nothing of it and moved on with my life.
5 months after having my 2nd child, I noticed my baby's face was partially paralyzed. If it weren't for the memory of my husband's grandmother with her half paralyzed face, I don't know if I would have immediately recognized it. But right then and there as I was staring at his smiling face, I recognized that familiar face of my husband's grandmother and immediately knew something was wrong. We took him to the ER, got him an MRI, and waited for the results. I remember being so scared, crying and silently praying that it not be cancer. Please God, please...just don't let it be cancer. I'll do anything you want me to do, just let it not be that. Was I not repeating the same words I had repeated just a couple years ago when we were in the hospital for my husband's seizures? Maybe this time God wouldn't be as gracious because maybe I didn't follow through with my words, but, once again, by the grace of God, it wasn't that. It was Bell's Palsy-apparently, something that happens when a virus hits a certain facial nerve. Basically, bad luck, hopefully..
3 months pass by and life has pretty much turned back to the way it was. My mom, who was temporarily staying with us to help out with the baby had gone back home since my baby's face was turning back to normal. May 31, 2016 I'm checking the mail and I see a bill from my husband's ambulance ride to the ER that occurred over 2 years ago. I think, that's weird. How did they even find our new address and why are we receiving this bill after so much time has passed? I thought it was strange, but just tossed it to the side to deal with it later. Later would never come though because that same night, I made my 2nd call to 911 and the next day my husband was sent into surgery to remove a mass the size of a golf ball out of his brain. My mom came back and 2 weeks later, he was diagnosed with malignant glioblastoma multiforme- the same terminal brain cancer I had watched about the years before. The cancer that I was terrified of my baby having, the cancer that I was terrified of my husband having just 2 short years ago. And all of a sudden, all of those seemingly meaningless, fleeting memories had meaning.
Wait. Those signs. God was trying to show me the signs. ALL those signs!! HOW COULD I HAVE IGNORED IT?!? WHY DIDN'T I PICK UP ON IT??? So I replay it over and over again. Was it all just a coincidence? NO. It's TOO big of a coincidence to be a coincidence!!! SO WHY?? What's the purpose of it all!??! Was it some kind of foreshadowing?? Why did I not see the signs?? What if I saw the signs? Could I have prevented him from getting brain cancer??? I never paid that old ambulance bill, by the way, and I never received another one.
Obviously, even if I had known at the time that they were indeed possible signs telling me that my husband was going to get brain cancer, what could I have done? The fact is, he was diagnosed with GBM IV, a cancer so aggressive that it doesn't even go through the traditional cancer stages. It starts as GBM IV and ends as GBM IV. It's not something that metastasizes and goes from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. So even if I had paid attention to the signs and caught it early, it would still have been too late. Why did I get that old ambulance bill?? What was the purpose in that? To prepare me for what would come later that night? I don't know. I still don't really know the purpose of it all, but with the gift of hindsight, I see that quite possibly maybe they were just affirmations from God. Perhaps nothing is a coincidence. Everything is planned. And God showed me those signs to let me know that he was with me all along...even before the beginning.
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