Walking the talk

        

I got a good reminder that I’m still human.  Over the weekend, I got an email about someone I know having a health crisis.  She had severe abdominal pain and was taken to the hospital.  After running tests, the doctors believed there was a mass in their colon, likely cancer.  She was scheduled to have a colonoscopy in the following day or so.

I was wringing my hands.  She’s my age and has three kids – two are the same age as my kids and one is a young toddler.  I don’t know her that well, but from what I know of her, she’s a caring, centered person who gets the most out of life. 

Her husband was emailing updates and from what I can tell, they are quite an evangelically Christian family, so he was talking about prayer and Bible passages. 

I had been out of town over the weekend, but before we came home I checked my email.  It turned out that the mass was not cancer, but some sort of an infection curable with a heavy dose of antibiotics.  I was absolutely thrilled that she got a “best case scenario.”

And I’d be completely lying if I said I didn’t have just a minor twinge of resentment.  Not that I ever, ever would wish cancer on anyone, but it was more one of those “Well howscome she dodged a bullet and not me???” 

To make me even more tweaked, her husband sent out an email attributing her outcome to the strength of prayer from the community.  In an email she called it a miracle.  And today, one of her friends told me that the doctors are stymied about what happened and, again, that there must have been SO MANY PEOPLE praying for her.

I went from a twinge to a sock in the gut.  Oh, sure, I thought, if more people just CARED ABOUT ME maybe I could have deserved a miracle.  Maybe my miracle was stunted by my own lack of faith or my unrepentant bevy of sins.  Sure, it had been 30 years since my last confession, but geez, cancer seems like a pretty harsh penance.  I know I am ambivalent about spirituality, but come on.  Can’t you smote the really bad people?

Never mind that a nun at the kids school today told me that “God’s been good” to me.  Never mind that this kind miracle recipient told me in an email that when she thought it was cancer, she drew inspiration from the way I handled my little c run in.  Never mind that I’m here typing this, no sign of cancer left, wading into depths I couldn’t have dreamed of before last year.  Nope, there’s still an open wound around the topic of getting what you deserve. 

So in case anyone tells you that surviving cancer treatment will transform you into sainthood, you know the truth.