Fly a Little Higher Read online

  Unfortunately, X-ray readings aren’t foolproof.

  The small lesion in Zach’s left hip, the little spot a specialist with a trained eye would have noticed, went unseen and quietly grew and grew. Through two months of physical therapy, the lesion had time to get bigger and bigger, until it was so big that Zach could no longer walk without a severe limp or even bend over to tie his shoes.

  His therapist sent him for an MRI.

  Cancer never entered my mind.

  Four

  IT WAS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2009. ROB HAD TAKEN THE DAY OFF work, and we’d spent a leisurely morning together at home before going out for lunch and heading into town to the MRI appointment. It was a rarity in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives. We didn’t have much time to spend together.

  For most of our marriage I was a stay-at-home mom, though I usually had some kind of side job that brought in a little money. I had worked as a day-care provider, screened phone calls for a local charity, and taught CPR classes at a hospital. By the time Grace, our fourth and youngest child, was in school full time, I had taken over as coordinator of the CPR education program at the hospital and had taken a part-time job at a dental office. An itch for adventure led me to join our local fire department where I served as an EMT and firefighter. I was busy, and I loved it.

  Rob worked full time as a logistics manager at a medical diagnostic test company. His mother, who was eighty-one, widowed, and failing in health, lived on a farm two hours from us. Her only other child, Rob’s brother, lived out of state, so much of her care landed on Rob. He hadn’t had a day alone in months, and I knew he was due for one.

  “Why don’t you just hang out at home today?” I said to him that morning. “It’s just a routine MRI. I’m sure we’ll be in and out. The doctor probably won’t even look at it until next week, anyhow.”

  “No, I’m going,” he insisted. “I want to be there.” I was pleasantly surprised he wanted to go. I enjoyed our time together, when we could find it. We were getting to that point in our marriage where I sometimes wondered if we had anything in common apart from the kids. We got along just fine, but I felt like we were drifting apart.

  It was early afternoon. The colors of fall had given way to the drab gray of winter, and the snow wouldn’t come to brighten it up for another couple of weeks. Rob and I pulled into the school parking lot and waited a minute or two before Zach stepped out of the school entrance onto the sidewalk and hobbled toward the car. He looked nervous but managed to give us a grin and a wave as he approached, then hopped into the backseat of the car.

  “Hey, hon. You ready for this?” I asked as he did his best to arrange his long legs into a comfortable position and buckled himself in. His hip and height made small spaces difficult to maneuver sometimes.

  “Yeah. I asked around to see if anyone else in my class has had an MRI before. A girl from first hour had one last year. She said it took a long time and was noisy but that it wasn’t a huge deal.” I caught his eye in the rearview mirror as I backed the car out of the parking spot. “She said the trick is to get comfortable before you go into the tube.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine, Zach,” Rob encouraged. “You can put up with anything for a half hour. You’re tough. You can handle it. Heck! You’ve been through a full day of school with a broken thumb,” he teased while giving me a sideways glance.

  “Not fair,” I scolded while I slapped Rob’s thigh. “Every mom gets at least one epic fail.”

  Zach laughed from the backseat. “Yeah, Mom. Major epic fail.”

  At the hospital, a nurse led us down a hall to a changing room.

  “You’ll need to take all your clothes off. Everything, even underwear,” she said as she held out a plastic bag and a gown. Zach glanced at me. I raised my eyebrows as if to say, Sorry. The nurse continued, “You can put your clothes in here, then put the gown on; it ties in the back. When you’re done, just step out and I’ll take you down the hall to the procedure room.”

  Zach took the bag and gown and closed the door behind him.

  The nurse turned to us to explain the procedure as she led us to a waiting area.

  “We’ll do an X-ray guided dye injection directly into Zach’s hip, and then we’ll take him to the MRI machine just down the hall,” she explained. “The injection will take about twenty minutes, and the MRI should only take about a half hour.”

  “Will he be in a lot of pain?” I asked.

  “He’ll be a little sore, but it shouldn’t last too long. A little ibuprofen should do the trick,” she said.

  Rob and I took a seat in the waiting area, and twenty minutes later Zach emerged from the procedure room. He looked pale and miserable.

  “How’d it go?” I asked cautiously.

  “Bad.” He looked like he’d been punched in the gut.

  “Oh, babe. I’m sorry,” I said as I took the bag that held his clothing from his hands. “The worst should be over.” I glanced at Rob. He frowned with a look of concern in his deep blue eyes as he peered through his glasses. Zach wasn’t one to complain much, but when he did, we knew it was bad. Rob hated to see his son suffer.

  The nurse led Zach down the hall to the MRI room, and Rob and I took a seat in the main waiting area. I pulled a book out of my oversized purse, grateful for the distraction and rare opportunity to read, and Rob grabbed a Business Weekly from the magazine rack. A half hour passed, then forty minutes, then fifty, and I wondered what was taking so long. After an hour, the nurse came back out with a clipboard and a form and called us into the hallway just outside the MRI room.

  “We spoke with your doctor on the phone; he would like us to do an IV dye injection. It will allow us to get a clearer picture,” she said as she handed me the clipboard. “If you could just sign the consent.” She was a middle-aged woman, a few years older than me, with short dark hair and pale blue eyes.

  “What do you think?” I asked Rob. I was reluctant to put Zach through more pain, and he’d already been in the machine for an hour.

  “Well, we’re here, we might as well get it done,” he replied. “The sooner we have this done, the sooner we’ll know what’s going on.”

  I signed the form and handed it back to her. She immediately turned and walked back into the MRI room, the door clicking shut behind her. I walked with Rob back into the waiting room, and we sat down.

  “That’s not good,” Rob said, shaking his head.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “They just need a better view.”

  “Or they see something concerning and want to double-check it.”

  It annoyed me sometimes, how Rob tended to see the dark side of everything. I was sure this was just routine stuff and nothing to get worried about. If he wanted to worry, there was nothing that would stop him. I picked up my book and settled back into the story.

  After another half hour, the nurse peeked around the door and into the waiting room to tell us Zach was done and would join us momentarily. I set my book down and stepped into the restroom. When I came out, Rob was standing in the corner of the room by the lobby phone. I walked across the room to where he stood.

  “The nurse came back out and said the doctor wants to talk to us right away.” He answered the question playing out on my face. The phone rang, and Rob picked it up.

  “Hello,” Rob answered.

  And life changed . . . forever.

  I STEPPED IN CLOSER TO ROB, THE PHONE HELD TO HIS EAR. WHY IS the doctor so eager to catch us before we leave? I wondered. We had been told earlier that the doctor would call with the results on Monday. I was impatient and wanted to listen in, so I pressed my ear to the back of the phone, hoping to catch a little of what the doctor was saying, as Rob listened to the doctor on the line. Zach was seated across the room, exhausted and miserable, looking like a cat who’d just been dunked in a pool of water, but he watched us intently.

  The words were muffled. “. . . tumor . . . it’s bad . . . hard year ahead,” were all I could hear.

 
; I stepped away as Rob continued to talk to the doctor. Tumor? I saw the X-ray two months ago; how could there be a tumor? My legs went weak as my brain worked to process what I’d just heard, and I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I looked across the room at Zach where he sat patiently waiting. What do I tell him? I wondered.

  Of course, the first thought that filled my mind was cancer. I assumed it would be the first to enter his mind as well. But there were so many unknowns, and I didn’t want to burden him with so little information. I didn’t have enough to put him at ease, but I certainly had enough to scare him.

  Zach watched me as I walked toward him. He wore a look of expectation; he needed to know what was going on. Rob finished the conversation with the doctor. I had no idea what to tell Zach as I sat down next to him, my body numb and my brain scurrying to process the news.

  By the time I turned to him and opened my mouth, I knew all I could do was tell him the simple truth. I couldn’t make this easier, and I couldn’t protect him from this enemy, whatever it was. The only loving thing I could do was give him as much information as I had.

  “The MRI showed a tumor.”

  Zach held my gaze for a moment, then looked away from me and closed his eyes as he processed the news. My heart was breaking. In that moment he looked so small and vulnerable. Not like the tall, confident kid who just months earlier ran down a basketball court with ease, but like the three-year-old Zach who had pleaded with me through tears as he was strapped to a board in the doctor’s office so he would stay still enough for his forehead to be stitched up. That little boy had quieted his crying, pinched his eyes shut, and turned away from me when he realized I couldn’t save him.

  “What is it?” he asked after a few moments.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Okay,” he said as he rubbed his eyes to stop the tears from coming. A woman sat on the other side of him and noisily flipped through a magazine. “Can we go home now?”

  As we drove home, I was in agony. I needed the details. I needed to know exactly what the doctor had said, and I needed the scary questions that banged around in my head to be answered: Where is it? How big is it? What is it? What is our next step, and what does “it’s bad” mean? Rob kept his eyes on the road, and we kept the discussion in the car to a minimum.

  “How are you feeling, babe?” I looked over my shoulder at Zach, his head resting against the car window and his eyes closed.

  “That was the worst thing I’ve ever had to go through,” he mumbled back. “The injection was really bad, but laying in the machine for over an hour was the worst. I never want to have to go through something that awful again.”

  We pulled into the driveway of our modest multilevel home. It was late afternoon and the sun was setting; its remaining light filtered through the tall trees in the front yard and danced across the pale yellow siding and windows. A hard freeze had turned the once-colorful perennial flower garden that lined the front sidewalk to a now-dead brown mass of leaves and sticks. Grace met us at the door.

  “Mom, I need help with my math homework.” She stood holding out her workbook.

  “Why don’t you have Dad sit down with you while I get dinner started?” I asked.

  “What is for dinner, Mom?” Sam asked as he pulled open the refrigerator door. “I’m starving.”

  “I don’t have any idea,” I said as I set my purse down and hung my coat in the closet. I went to the kitchen and pulled a pot out of the cupboard, filled it with water, and set it on the stove. I felt like I was in a bubble and everything was in slow motion except my mind—it was racing. All sorts of thoughts ran through my head. There would probably be surgery, plus a fair amount of time for recovery. Basketball was out for this year. What about next year? School would be tough, but Zach would be able to keep up.

  Zach tossed his coat on the chair by the front door and retreated downstairs to the family room. Rob sat down at the kitchen table as Grace set her workbook in front of them. I started frying up hamburger meat to make spaghetti.

  I looked at the clock on the stove. It was five forty-five; Zach’s guitar lesson was scheduled for six.

  “Zach, are you feeling well enough to go to your lesson?” I called down to him.

  There was a brief pause, then: “Yeah. I’ll go.”

  “Sam, would you please give Zach a ride?”

  “Fine.” He scraped the last little bit from a yogurt cup and tossed it into the garbage.

  Zach came upstairs, his guitar slung over his shoulder, and the two of them walked out the door. They would be gone for at least forty-five minutes. The anxiety had boiled up in me like the pot of water I’d put on the stove. Rob and I were finally able to talk freely, so I motioned to him to join me in the living room just off the kitchen.

  “What did the doctor say?” I asked in a hushed tone. “Tell me everything.”

  “He said the MRI clearly showed a large tumor in Zach’s left hip, in the femoral neck,” he told me.

  “How big is it?” I cut in.

  “He isn’t sure. He won’t know exactly until the radiologist looks at it and measures it. But he said it was significant.”

  “I don’t get it! How can that be? I took him in two months ago, and the doctor didn’t see anything,” I asked out loud but mostly to myself. I knew Rob didn’t have the answers.

  “There are three possibilities the doctor said it could be,” he continued as he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket where he had written them down. “Lymphoma, fibrous dysplasia, or osteosarcoma. Osteosarcoma is the worst of the three,” Rob said as he carefully folded the paper and tucked it back into his pocket. “We have to see an orthopedic surgeon; he said he’d have his nurse set up an appointment for us. He wants us to get in right away because whatever it is, it’s bad and we’ll have a long and hard year ahead of us.”

  As Rob talked, I lowered myself down into a chair in the corner of the room, and I broke down and sobbed. The gravity of the news and the reality that Zach’s life—all our lives—had changed forever was finally penetrating my brain. Rob sat down on the ottoman next to me and held my hand for a moment until Grace called needing help with a homework problem.

  My racing mind began to slow as I mentally saw pieces of Zach’s life fall away. Sports. Carefree teen years. A future of boundless opportunity. How would he handle missing out on sports? They were such a huge part of his life. Thank God he has the guitar, I thought.

  Then my mind landed on the stripped-down and naked realization: Zach could die. We could actually lose him. My mind stopped clamoring, and I felt like my next breath would never come as the thought penetrated my whole being.

  Zach could die. Zach could die. Zach could die . . .

  Finally, I took a deep breath. A quiet but powerful peace began to fill my soul. It settled in me and surrounded me like an embrace or a warm blanket. In that moment of stillness there were two clear thoughts that surfaced. The first was, I am so grateful to know Zach, and the second was, God is asking us for something big. I knew I was being presented with a choice. A choice between faith in a loving God who knew all things and was in control, or a choice to fall into despair and anger that this horrible and terrifying thing was happening to us. And then I had a vivid image of God’s face turned to me, His gaze resting on us as He waited for an answer. I knew without a doubt that God was present, and He was asking us to trust Him.

  Okay, I thought, we’ll do this. We will trust in You.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER ZACH GOT HOME FROM HIS LESSON AND dished up a plate of spaghetti that he brought downstairs, I went down to the family room and sat next to him on the couch. Without looking at me, he laid his head full of thick blond curls on my shoulder.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked, loving the fact that this big boy was still okay with being close to his mom. He raised his head and looked at me.

  “I think it’s about something big,” he responded. “I think God has something planned.”

  I was r
elieved at his ability to find God in all things. Even when he was very small, just a toddler, he would look at a flower and declare, “God made it pretty.” Now he was being challenged to see God in the not-so-pretty things, his open heart ready to receive the grace that God would pour into it.

  I reached out and touched his smooth face. Too young to have stubble yet wise beyond his years. I stood from the couch and walked up the steps to the kitchen. The soothing sound of Zach gently strumming his guitar reached my ears and caused my heart to swell with love for that precious teenage boy. While I knew he was about to embark on a path that would not be easy, he would be okay. We would all be okay.

  Five

  AFTER A WEEK OF DOING AGONIZING RESEARCH OF THE VARIOUS possibilities but still hoping for the best, we went in for the biopsy. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, and the waiting room was full of people. The ones who were there for routine surgeries stood out; their companions were lighthearted and chatty. The ones who were there for more serious reasons were quiet. Rob, Zach, and I were quiet.

  Zach was called in. He was nervous; the MRI experience had left him shaken, and he was unsure of what the biopsy would feel like. When he was told he would be under general anesthesia, he relaxed a little. While Rob and I stepped into the hall, Zach pulled the privacy curtain closed in a small, glass-enclosed room. Then he donned an awkward paper gown, placed his clothes in one bag and his huge shoes in another, and lay down in a hospital bed that was about two inches too short. Loved ones of other patients milled around in the hallway, and doctors and nurses hustled from room to room.

  Before the biopsy, doctors and nurses came in and out of the room to introduce themselves and explain their various roles. Zach was cordial and talkative with them. Several doctors double-checked his age; his size and maturity made him seem older than his fourteen years.