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    Lessons of the Spirit: A Christian Spiritual Companion for Your Breast Cancer Journey
    Lessons of the Spirit: A Christian Spiritual Companion for Your Breast Cancer Journey
    Lessons of the Spirit: A Christian Spiritual Companion for Your Breast Cancer Journey
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    Lessons of the Spirit: A Christian Spiritual Companion for Your Breast Cancer Journey

    By Rhonda Joy Rubinson

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    About this ebook

    Using scripture and prayers, breast cancer survivor and Episcopal priest Rhonda Joy Rubinson helps the breast cancer patient and their loved ones navigate the complex and stressful world of diagnosis and treatment. Lessons of the Spirit is part guidebook, part meditation, part sermon, and part memoir. It will prove an invaluable companion to both patients and their loved ones who are making the journey through breast cancer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMira Digital Publishing
    Release dateMar 4, 2020
    ISBN9780990575818
    Lessons of the Spirit: A Christian Spiritual Companion for Your Breast Cancer Journey

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      Book preview

      Lessons of the Spirit - Rhonda Joy Rubinson

      Acknowledgments

      Prologue

      Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, I called to the LORD out of my distress and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.

      – Jonah 2:1-7¹

      How did I get here?

      As I lay on the table in the very bright, very cold operating room in October of 2008, that question pounds in my head yet again, as it had innumerable times from the moment my gynecologist first felt my right breast six months earlier and said, Oh my God, you have a humongous mass in there! I’m sending you to a breast surgeon this afternoon.

      At the beginning of May of 2008, I felt fine. In fact, I felt great, better than I had in years. I had been working out in the gym, lost a bit of weight, and felt strong. The spring semester at Barnard College where I had worked for the previous 25 years was coming to a close. The whole summer sparkled before me, filled with plans for travel and fun. Also slated for the summer was the winding down of my work at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, where I had served as interim priest since the previous September. I had a one-year contract, and although things had gone well, it felt like too much to juggle with my full time job at Barnard. My intention was to leave when my contract expired in September.

      Cancer does not run in my family at all – I mean at all. There is heart disease and glaucoma and colitis, but no cancer whatsoever beyond some tiny squamos cell lesions removed from my fairskinned mother, the product of her having suffered serious sunburns as a young woman. However, all the women on Mom’s side of the family (including me) had been diagnosed with fibrocystic breasts, and nearly all of us, myself included, had been told at some point that we had breast cancer when we didn’t. So when my gynecologist freaked out that May morning, I was fully convinced that this was yet another one of those scares, I had seen them before. I thought: fine, I’ll go get a biopsy on this thing, we’ll find out that it’s harmless, and that would be that.

      Yet since the preceding February, I knew that there was something unusual going on in my breast. The day following an upper body workout at the Columbia University gym, I had felt some soreness on both sides of my chest. When I felt the right side up towards the shoulder I felt a swelling. I was convinced that I had injured myself, either giving myself a nasty muscle spasm or perhaps provoked a fibroid. But I needed a new gynecologist, and this discovery fast-tracked my search for a new one. My longtime ob-gyn had moved out of town, and I was having trouble finding a replacement. I had asked friends and colleagues for recommendations, but every doctor I called either didn’t take my insurance or wasn’t taking on new patients. So I called the office of my old gynecologist and booked an appointment with one of her associates, a young woman I didn’t know. I did not mention the swelling. The earliest appointment for a regular exam for a new patient was May 8.

      As it turned out, my new gynecologist was right to freak out. The mass was stage four malignant invasive ductile breast cancer. It was big – over 9 cm long – and it was serious.

      Over the next six months ensued two sets of biopsies, numerous mammograms, a set of 4 sonograms, a breast MRI, a PET/CT scan, eight rounds of strong chemotherapy, followed by another breast MRI, and another PET/CT scan. Now in October the nurses in the operating room were placing a mechanical massage machine on my legs and switching on a warm air blower underneath the blanket they had mercifully laid upon me. The anesthesiologist was hurriedly hooking an anesthesia line into the latest of what seemed like a million IVs in my left arm.

      As I lay on the table, I was vaguely aware that after surgery I still faced seven weeks of daily radiation treatments, but I was too scared and too sick to worry about the future. I felt truly rotten from the chemo course that had ended only a few weeks earlier. It was nearly 4 o’clock on Friday afternoon – one of the nurses had said that she was so glad that I was the last surgery of the week – and I was woozy, headachy, weak, and queasy from the stress of waiting all day for surgery having not eaten or drunk anything since 8 PM the night before. Even though my eyes were jammed shut, I must have still looked seriously panicked because someone, probably my surgeon, was stroking my right arm and saying it’s okay – we’ll take care of you, just go to sleep.

      The oxygen mask came down over my face.

      It doesn’t matter how I got here, there’s no going back.

      Please God, help me.

      The anesthesia shot into my arm ….

      1 Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural citations are taken from the New Revised

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