A Simple Christmas Read online

  By August of 1975, the orthopedic surgeon wanted to put Janet in a Little Rock hospital and try another round of traction, therapy, and medication with the understanding that if that didn’t result in any improvement, surgery and disc repair would be the next course of action. Another week in an even more expensive hospital in Little Rock yielded nothing but medical bills and more lost income. The doctor told us that he would schedule surgery for her in late September. “Textbook stuff,” he assured us.

  Surgery was set for the third week of September. I was trying to juggle classes during what was my final semester at school, my work schedule, and getting to and from Little Rock every day to make sure Janet was okay. The day before the surgery, the doctor had scheduled a myelogram, an X-ray that involved injecting dye into the spinal area and then viewing the damaged disc to determine exactly where the incision should be.

  As I sat alone in the waiting room of the radiology ward, I noticed that the test was taking longer than they had led me to believe. After a while, a nurse appeared and asked me to follow her to a small “consultation room” down the hall. Even though I was barely twenty years old, I knew that wasn’t a sign that the doctor was about to give me good news. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor finally appeared, and when he walked in, I almost didn’t recognize him. His face was as white as his lab coat, and his normal proud and rather cocky attitude had been replaced by a very humble spirit. He seemed to be fumbling for words before he said, “I’ve canceled your wife’s surgery for tomorrow. The myelogram revealed that it’s not a disc after all.” (So much for that textbook.) “Your wife has a tumor, and it’s located within the canal of her spine and I can’t operate in there. I have called in a neurosurgeon who will come and visit with you and explain what the options are.”

  With that, he left, and I sat there alone trying to soak in what he had just told me.

  Cancer.

  That’s a word that twenty-year-old healthy women (or their twenty-year-old husbands) aren’t supposed to be faced with, but here I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my wife had it.

  Within a few hours, Dr. Thomas Fletcher, a Little Rock neurosurgeon, walked into Janet’s room at Doctors Hospital. His gentle and soft-spoken manner was comforting and reassuring, but his words cut right to our hearts. The tumor was embedded within the spinal canal and was possibly inoperable. If this was the case, there wouldn’t be any treatment to cure Janet, just efforts to make the remaining days of her short life as comfortable as possible. If the tumor had not spread or could be reached, then we needed to be prepared for the likelihood that, in removing it, there would be a severing of or severe damage to the spinal cord and Janet would be paralyzed from just above the waist down for the rest of her life. Those were the two scenarios that Dr. Fletcher prepared us for, and neither gave us much hope. There in the quiet fourth-floor hospital room, it seemed that our future had been dashed on the rocks of reality.

  If there was a silver lining in this cloud, my tear-filled eyes couldn’t see it. I did my best to outwardly show confidence and optimism, primarily to keep Janet from giving up and also to further the façade that my faith was unshaken and firm in the face of such unexpected news.

  Dr. Fletcher told us that with our approval he would schedule surgery in the next few days and would do what he could, but at the same time, he told us to understand that while we would hope for the best, he could not promise us a good outcome. He had diagnosed the tumor as a rare type of cancer that tended to reappear in other areas of the spine if there was reoccurrence. Later we came to understand that in some forms of cancer, if there is no reoccurrence after five years, the patient is considered cured, but with others a ten-year period has to pass before the patient is considered clear. Janet had the ten-year version.

  The surgery was scheduled for September 29, 1975. Janet and I had been married for one year, four months, and four days. I was on schedule to complete my BA degree in December, and because of the accelerated pace at which I had worked on my degree, the fall semester of 1975 turned out to be my lightest of all. In fact, I only had to complete eight academic hours to fulfill my degree requirements, and six of those were for a class that I was taking on Tuesday and Thursday nights, so that meant that by sheer Providence, I would have more free time than usual to take care of my sick young wife.

  Of course, just when you don’t think things can get worse, they usually do. While I was in the hospital room visiting Janet, someone broke into my car in broad daylight in the hospital parking lot and stole a CB radio and a little briefcase that contained a Bible, some college textbooks, and some class notes from a theology course I was taking. While I could see the irony in the thief opening the briefcase and finding a Bible and class notes for a course in biblical studies, the thought that a thief who was probably wealthier than me at that moment would break into my car just about did me in. I truly wondered if God had moved and left no forwarding address. If He was answering my prayers, He was doing it on a different frequency than the one I was monitoring, and I had to wonder about the why of it all.

  Janet had had to leave her job weeks earlier due to the back problems, and we had been forced to make do without her income. On top of that, the church where I worked part time was so small and so broke that, in the very midst of Janet’s health crisis, they had had to stop paying me for six weeks because they had run out of money.

  In addition to my two jobs, and my new job taking care of Janet, I wrote a weekly column for a Baptist newspaper published in Arkansas. I had been doing this since my junior year of high school, and within the circle of churches affiliated with the Baptist Missionary Association of Arkansas (a much smaller denomination than Southern Baptists), I had earned some name recognition. As word spread of the situation with Janet, I received some stunning correspondence from people who pointedly told me that the calamities we were experiencing were surely “God’s punishment” for some untold evil one or both of us had committed. How anyone could be both that stupid and that cold-hearted in the name of Jesus escapes me even now.

  But just as some used the brokenness of our lives and spirits like crushed gravel to walk upon, others were incredibly compassionate, and we were overwhelmed with the kindnesses of both our dear friends and total strangers.

  In addition to the nasty notes of condemnation, the mail brought notes of encouragement, often with small amounts of money inside from a Sunday-school class in some church we’d never heard of or from some dear, sweet family who had been through something similar and were now offering their encouragement to us. Most of the gifts we received were between five and twenty-five dollars, but at a time when our income had disappeared and our expenses had increased dramatically, we had just enough to make it. My college roommate, Rick Caldwell, was especially instrumental in helping. His dad, a wealthy oil and gas distributor and cattle rancher, helped pay some of the medical bills that our insurance didn’t cover and even got some of his friends to join him. It was humbling to have so many people show their kindness to us, but it changed our perspective on the way we lived. Through the years, Janet and I have quietly but regularly given gifts large and small to people we learned were facing a crisis. In some cases, they were people we knew, but in other cases, they were total strangers we’d read about or met as we went about our daily routines.

  The surgery was scheduled for 7:00 A.M., and we had been told that it could last eight hours or more, so we were prepared for a long wait. Janet’s mother, Pat, drove up from Hope to be there. She brought some knitting to work on to keep her mind occupied for what we assumed would be a very long, tedious, and exhausting day. Dr. Fletcher had explained that his likely course of action was to make the incision in the lower back around lumbar vertebrae five and six, use a surgical microscope to see how embedded the tumor was inside the spinal canal, and then attempt to remove it by scraping it away from the spinal cord. The degree to which it had attached itself to the spinal cord would determine the permanent damage that w
ould be done to save her life or would indicate that the tumor was inoperable, in which case it was only a matter of time before her body could no longer fight off the aggressive invader.

  At about 9:30 in the morning, I was standing in the hall near the surgical waiting room talking with a visitor who had dropped by to offer prayers and encouragement when I thought I saw Dr. Fletcher walking toward me down the long hallway. As he got closer, I noticed that not only was it definitely Dr. Fletcher, but he wasn’t wearing his surgical scrubs and had already changed into a suit and tie as if heading to his office. The fact that we had not received any indication of the progress of the surgery nor had any update from a nurse or other hospital personnel added to the size of the lump in my throat as he approached and asked to visit privately with Janet’s mother and me. The only thing I could think was that either Janet hadn’t made it through the surgery or that Dr. Fletcher had opened her up, looked at the situation, and simply closed her back up. I tried to brace myself for horrible news. The worried look on my mother-in-law’s face quickly gave way to tears as she too realized the news that she was likely about to hear.

  Dr. Fletcher then calmly and gently told us that when he had gotten to the tumor, expecting it to be firmly attached or wrapped in the spinal cord, he had started the extraction and it had simply dislodged. He said he was surprised, but he had been able to remove the four- or five-inch elongated tumor that had grown inside the bony structure of her spine. I’ll never forget him saying, “I think you guys had a lot of people praying for her . . . and me.”

  He was right.

  The next few hours were tense and seemed to last forever. While the tumor had dislodged and been removed, only time would tell if there had been any permanent damage to the spinal cord and with it, a lifetime of paralysis. After Janet was brought out of the ICU and into her room, we waited and watched to see if there was movement in her legs—that would be the sign that she had not experienced irreversible damage. She was heavily sedated, and we were told that it would be a while before the anesthetic wore off enough for her to regain movement. It was almost 4:00 P.M. when the stillness of the room was interrupted by the sudden movement of her feet under the covers. Everyone in the room wept with joy at a simple but very reassuring movement that ordinarily we would have taken for granted. We wouldn’t take anything for granted after that.

  As relieved as we were that the worst seemed to be over, the postoperative period brought its own challenges. Due to the nature of the tumor, Dr. Fletcher advised that Janet undergo six weeks of intense radiation therapy to eradicate any cancer cells that the surgery might have missed. Other than the normal downside to radiation (especially in 1975, when some of the procedures were primitive by today’s standards), we were warned that the location of the radiation in the lower part of her back and pelvis would likely mean that the inevitable damage done to her ovaries would make having children impossible. This was devastating news, naturally, but in the past few months, we had learned to live with what we had now, not what we hoped might happen in the future. Without the radiation we knew there might not be a future.

  After a week in the hospital recovering, Janet was ready to come home to our little duplex in Arkadelphia. It consisted of two rooms, a living room and a tiny bedroom, plus a small kitchen and a bathroom that was so small that there was barely room to stand sideways between the tub and the sink and toilet. I rented a hospital bed from a local medical supply store and set it up in the living room. It pretty much took up the entire room, but it was a necessary inconvenience for the next several weeks, since Janet would have limited mobility and would need a bar over the bed to be able to lift herself so she could have her sheets changed or move the bedpan. She had to be brought back home in an ambulance because she wasn’t able to walk yet. We had a couple of weeks at home for her to start the recovery process before she would start the radiation therapy.

  I piled pillows, blankets, and an old camping mattress in the backseat of the car so she could lie down for the drive to and from Little Rock each day once the radiation got under way. This meant leaving the apartment around five fifteen each morning for the seventy-five-mile trip each way. We would arrive a little after seven o’clock, and she would have her treatment. The actual radiation lasted only about four minutes each day, but the preparation took about forty-five minutes. Shortly after eight o’clock, we’d be on our way back to Arkadelphia. I’d help her out of the car, partially carry her to the house, and get her settled back in the hospital bed, and then it would be time for me to head off to work or to class. I’d check in through the day before returning home to make dinner and help her get to sleep, and then I’d study until I fell asleep and the next morning’s alarm went off at four thirty for us to get up and do it all again.

  Five days a week for six straight weeks we made the trip. By the time we had finished, Janet had regained the ability to walk unassisted, which in itself was progress. It was early December when the radiation treatments ended and so did my course requirements for my degree. For months, we had planned on moving to Fort Worth, Texas, following my graduation so I could enroll at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where I hoped to further prepare for what I thought was a future in some form of Christian broadcasting, either radio or television or both. We had feared that all of those plans might have to be delayed, but Janet seemed strong enough to make the move, and frankly, we decided that it was just as easy to be broke and struggling through school in Fort Worth as to be broke and not even going to school in Arkansas. I applied, was accepted, and then received notice that we had been accepted for seminary-owned housing in Fort Worth. The letter said that we’d be living in a two-bedroom house near the campus and the rent would be seventy-five dollars a month. Since our little duplex was forty dollars a month, we were thinking that a two-bedroom house that cost almost twice as much must be some nice place.

  My dad helped us move, which wasn’t too difficult since we were able to put everything we owned in our car and a small U-Haul trailer, which my dad pulled behind his truck. The move to Fort Worth would be a new beginning and an opportunity to close what had been an instructive but painful chapter in our lives. We would be moving just about a week before Christmas, so this would be the first Christmas since Janet’s cancer, and for both of us it was the farthest we’d ever lived from our families. To us, Fort Worth was the “big city,” since the biggest place we’d ever lived had been Arkadelphia with about ten thousand people in the entire town.

  We carefully followed the instructions and map to get to our new house, which we imagined would have two decent-sized bedrooms with closets, hopefully two bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, with maybe a porch and a street with trees and a sidewalk. In our minds, we must have been thinking Leave It to Beaver meets Mayberry.

  When we pulled in to the address, we couldn’t help it. We both literally started laughing out loud. We had to, because crying wouldn’t have helped and at this stage of our lives, we didn’t care what kind of house we lived in as long as we were living. So we laughed when we saw that our “two-bedroom” house on Warren Street behind the seminary campus was sitting just off the single-lane, dead-end street and directly in front of the Katy Railroad tracks, which were at best forty yards from the back door. And the back door was really close to the front door, since the entire house couldn’t have occupied more than five hundred square feet. The “two bedrooms” were more the size of one with a hastily placed wall stuck in the middle to create another. There was one bathroom, which made the one in our old house look like a palace! The “living room” was barely an entryway to the kitchen, which was about the size of a Pullman kitchen. The floors were made of concrete covered with very cheap linoleum that was coming up in several places. One of our friends came to see us shortly after we moved in and proclaimed it “the Winnebago.” That would have been an insult to Winnebago, because even a medium-sized Winnebago is more spacious and far more welcoming than our new “house.” If the little recta
ngular house had had wheels, it would have truly looked like a Winnebago with a slightly pitched roof. But it was home and the rent was cheap, and I could walk or ride a bicycle to campus each day.

  That year had been a challenge to our finances, our families, our friends, and our faith. There were times when I questioned why God would allow such an experience to befall us. “Here we are, trying to be decent people and living our lives by believing in You, God,” I would pray. “Why is this happening to us?” It seemed like the answer was “Why not you? Are you too good to experience the hardships that the rest of the world has to live through?”

  In time, the answers would get clearer. When I served as a pastor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a few years later, I often entered the hospital room of a family who had received a similar little visit down the hall from a doctor who had uttered the same word I had heard a few years earlier—cancer. I could honestly say to them, “I do know how you feel,” and it mattered that I was not just talking about something abstract but speaking from the perspective of having been confronted with all the fears one has when getting that diagnosis. This happened almost every week of my time as a pastor.

  We settled in to our little “Winnebago,” and I prepared to start classes in January while diligently looking for a way to make enough money to pay our rent and my tuition.

  By then it was only a few days before Christmas—our first one as “refugees from Arkansas.” We had decided to go back to Hope for Christmas Day, even though the trip would be tough on Janet.

  The year had been one that had tested us to our core. We had faced down death and disability and survived. I had often prayed that we would experience a sudden and dramatic “miracle” and fully expected on several occasions to walk into the hospital and hear that she had been instantly and supernaturally healed to the complete surprise of the doctors. That never happened. Had it happened, we would have loved it. I could already hear in my mind the powerful testimony we could give about faith and the miracle on the other end of the experience. But it would have been a story that was so grand and so out of the ordinary that most people couldn’t have related to it. If the listeners facing cancer didn’t have the same outcome, such a testimony likely would have discouraged them into believing that something was wrong with them.