I wrote a couple of blog posts in January recapping what a momentous but exhausting year 2025 was for me and Randy. I closed the second post with this paragraph:
We’re looking forward to another great year. We have a few fun things planned, but none are the extensive adventures we undertook in 2025. We’re going to enjoy just sticking fairly close to home. I should be able to swim the entire season without breast health complications, cutting short my enjoyment of the sun, salt, and sand. This year, 2026, is a time for renewing, refreshing, and dreaming a little more about how the future is going to look. Maybe, just maybe, in 10 years we will have teleportation and replication. I, for one, can’t wait.
Randy and I were excited about what 2026 and beyond would bring to our lives. You all know we love living in Florida, we have discovered we enjoy a cruise every now and then, and we’ve just settled in to retirement life as we imagined it to be after 5 years filled with home improvement projects, hurricane experiences and repairs, and 2 bouts of breast cancer that have left me cancer free, though breastless.
We’re a couple weeks into visitor season, Randy’s sister Kristine and her husband Gary, are here. On Wednesday, his sister Lynn and her husband Dave will arrive. The 6 of us will have 4 days together, then Kristine and Gary depart after being here 2 weeks. We expect Lynn and Dave to be here 2 to 3 weeks.
Those visits have been long planned, and in retrospect, I am immensely grateful for the timing of what I’m about to tell you.
We went to Orlando a couple of weeks ago. Regular readers know that because I wrote this post about visiting Gatorland while we were there. In the P.S. of that post, I asked for prayer for Randy who began having health issues while we were there. At the time I wrote that, he had been admitted to the hospital from the Emergency Room for extensive testing.
After 4 days at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, he was allowed to return home. In the hospital tests revealed a lung cancer so advanced it has already metastasized to his brain. As of today, he has started radio surgery treatments for the brain cancer. He’s also on steroids that have helped disappear the symptoms that sent him to the ER in the first place.
His spirits are excellent, and if you didn’t know tests show cancer, you wouldn’t suspect anything except good physical health. I can’t tell you much more because we don’t know much more. We see a medical oncologist this coming Friday. The one who treated me for breast cancer, and whom I love, has agreed to accept Randy as a new patient.
We have no idea how the medical community will propose to treat the out of control, rogue cells growing in his lungs. We’ve read the clinical test results and had AI interpret them for us. We’ve done some research, but honestly, that’s dangerous. We don’t know enough to be able to discern how anything we read on the internet concerns his particular situation.
There is good news in the bad news.
We do know that attitude plays a critical role in cancer recovery. His, and mine, are great. I thank God for my 3 prior bouts of breast cancer. Getting his news only freaked us out about half as much as if it were our first cancer diagnosis.
We also know that the primary is non-small cell lung cancer, which of the 2 types of lung cancer is less aggressive and offers more treatment options than the other kind.
My friend Carla, and her husband Keith, have a son, Mark, who is a medical physicist at the Mayo Clinic. His specialty and area of expertise is radiation oncology. He has generously given us so much of his time and energy to help us understand how the radio surgery Randy is undergoing works, why it’s cutting-edge technology, and helping us formulate the questions to ask Randy’s medical team. Mark and his parents have been huge blessings to us, especially the past few weeks.
We understand well that none of us get out of here alive. We’re not afraid to talk about it. Or what happens between now and the time God calls us to make our permanent move to heaven. We all make that move sooner or later. Randy’s faith is rock solid and that gives us great comfort.
We are more grateful than ever that we had such a good year last year as we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary all year long. And that we finished every project we had planned for the house. It seems as though God orchestrated our lives to tie up a bunch of loose ends before we had to face this life-threatening challenge.
I need to be kind of careful about my hopes and plans for the future though. You know the old saying: If you want to make God laugh….tell Him your plans. It seems His plans and my plans this year differ. His always win.
P.S. I’ll break down, in next week’s post, everything we know so far, and what the medical professionals we are seeing propose to do about it. Randy and I are both adamant about quality of life over quantity of life. We’re going to live well right up until we die. Please continue to pray for peace, discernment, and for us to recognize all the joy and what Randy calls God Winks in the midst of this ordeal.
Leave a Reply