When Hope Was Taken Away
Choosing trust when a cure is denied.
How long can you endure something that makes you miserable in the hope that something better will come along—even if its time has not come?
That was a question I started asking myself after my second cancer treatment. A different injection drug for my third treatment gave us hope that the side effects would be less severe. New prescriptions to help with the potential side effects gave us hope that I would better tolerate this round of treatment.
Those hopes were short-lived.
Hope of a Cure
In September of 2024, I asked my oncologist about the current plan. The hepatobiliary surgeon wanted me to receive 4-6 treatments before performing surgery to remove the metastatic tumors from my liver. Was this a hard and fast number? Significant parts of our original treatment plan had already been modified due to complications. Would it be possible to move up the surgery date, remove the tumors, and, possibly, not forego further treatments? My oncologist was willing to modify the plan. A new MRCP scan was ordered (an enhanced MRI) to see if the lesions in my liver had grown in number, size, or both. I was told the tumor board would convene to discuss my results. The tentative plan was to schedule liver surgery as soon as possible.
It was now time to wait once more.
In the midst of this, I received a jury summons. I did not hesitate to call the hepatobiliary surgeon’s office to request a medical note saying I would be having surgery and would be unable to serve. The secretary told me that she would ask the doctor and I should receive something soon. “Soon” is a relative term, and as several business days passed without a response, I began to worry that something was wrong.
I inquired again. Another message was taken. Soon I received word that the surgeon wanted to speak with me about this at our upcoming appointment. This was another clue that something was amiss.
Hope Taken Away
I soon was able to meet with the surgeon for an in-person appointment. It did not go how I expected. The surgeon informed me that my recent MRCP scan now showed eight lesions in my liver instead of the five previously seen when I was first hospitalized in April. The surgeon gently reminded me what we had initially discussed when I first saw her for a consult earlier in the summer. Neuroendocrine tumors often metastasize to the liver and can be difficult to see on scans. Experience has shown that it is prudent to double the number of tumors seen on a scan when planning for surgery. This meant that seeing eight lesions likely meant there were at least sixteen tumors present in my liver. A successful surgery would remove a high percentage of the tumors without causing too much damage to the liver itself. In her estimation, success was extremely unlikely. She was no longer willing to offer surgery as an option. Beth and I maintained a calm façade, but we were both silently devastated. If there was any good news, it was that they went back and reviewed my initial MRCP from April and found all eight lesions on that scan (radiologists initially did not count three) and that all eight remained unchanged. The surgeon sent me back to my oncologist who would guide what happened next.
We saw my oncologist two days later. We certainly carried a heavy weight into the appointment. My oncologist stated the new goal. Rather than surgical excision to make me cancer-free, the goal was now to help me live a long life with cancer—and ultimately die of something else. How long of a life? There was no way of knowing. Some patients only live months, many live five years and beyond, and some live for decades. The doctor reminded us that all pathology reports showed my previously biopsied and excised tumor materials to be the slowest growing grade assigned to neuroendocrine tumors. He assured us that we had time to process the news and make some decisions about resuming treatments as a defense against future growth.
Ultimately, we decided to forego treatment for a three month period and do a repeat MRCP in December. By skipping treatment in September in hopes of surgery, we had unknowingly gotten a jump start on the plan. Treatment would be skipped again in October and November. A new MRCP was ordered before we left the office. This would give us a good baseline of how quickly the tumors in my liver were growing, if at all. It would also allow any new tumors time to show themselves. We could then make better decisions about what course of treatment to begin and, more importantly, when to begin treatments.
I struggled in the moment, and still struggle, to find adequate words that describe the emptiness and brokenness felt in these moments and the months that followed. We had a plan. I would have surgeries. The cancer would be removed surgically. It was all possible until it wasn’t. Hope had been taken away.
Some twenty years earlier, a Christian songwriter named Matt Redman wrote a song called “Blessed Be Your Name.” The lyrics draw from the Book of Job in the Old Testament. The first verse begins by proclaiming that the singer will bless God’s name in times of plenty. It continues by iterating that the singer will also bless the name of the Lord in a place of desolation. This is reinforced in the chorus. It is a song I’ve used as a musician when leading prayer for youth groups, retreats, prayer gatherings, and more. The bridge is taken from Job 1:21, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”
The lyrics of the song and the prayer of Job are easy to pray in times of comfort, abundance, and consolation. I wasn’t sure I had the strength to pray them after learning I would have cancer for the rest of my life. But like the prayer from Blessed Chiara Badano (“It’s for You, Jesus; If you want it, I want it too.”), there was value in praying this prayer from Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”
I need to be careful in how I say this. Sometimes it comes across as me saying “God gave me cancer” and “God took away any hope of a cure”. I don’t particularly think God directly did these things as much as He allowed them to happen through His permissive will. He permitted me to have cancer. He permitted hope of a cure to be removed. Why? So that I could encounter Him in my brokenness and receive the grace He offers that is more powerful than any cancer. Once again, He was inviting me into deeper intimacy with Him. It was almost as if He was saying, “Adam, you’ve trusted me to bring you this far. Will you trust me to take you even farther? Do you trust that I can work through this?”
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
This was the challenge before us. Did we have the courage and the grace necessary to keep praising God in the midst of this turmoil.
The physical manifestations of stress and anxiety that followed this change in plan were intense. There were two episodes where the symptoms sent me back to the emergency room. In one instance, I could not breathe normally and my oxygen saturation would not stay above 93%. In the other, I was having incredible tightness and pain in my chest and upper back. Tests quickly ruled out anything acute. The providers diagnosed each episode as an intense spell of anxiety. They kindly reminded me that I had every reason to be anxious and encouraged me to follow up with my primary care provider to see how the anxiety could be managed. They were confident it wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.
St. Paul exhorts us in his letter to the Philippians to “have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7). How could Paul say this? How could Job, who literally had everything but his wife taken from him, say “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord”?
Perhaps the answer began with something as simple as the Morning Offering prayer that I had begun praying daily in 2020 when I started hosting a morning radio show. Four and a half years had laid a foundation of offering “my prayers, works, joys and sufferings” to Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. A priest friend once remarked, “sometimes the catechesis is in the doing.” How do I go about having no anxiety and blessing the name of the Lord? The more I prayed with this question, the more I came to see that it wasn’t a matter of never having anxiety. Rather, it was an invitation to surrender that anxiety to Jesus when it would come.
“Jesus, I am anxious about this right now. What if the cancer gets worse? What if my time is short? Would you please take this anxiety from me and pour out Your grace upon me? You have shown time and time again that You are with us. Please help me to trust that You are with us now.”
“Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.”
— 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18
The Ultimate Hope of Healing
At some point in this part of the journey, one of our children asked me a difficult question. The weight of our family’s cross impacted our five children in different ways and she bore a heavy burden. It was not easy for her to accept that I had been diagnosed in the first place and now she carried the weight of hearing that I could not have the tumors removed.
“Dad, will you ever be cured?”
A beautiful conversation followed. We pivoted from the word “cured” and instead focused on the word “healing”. We talked about what it meant to be healed. The conversation ultimately focused on one point: the ultimate healing we could ever hope for is found in Heaven. We focused on Pope St. John Paul II’s letter Salvifici Doloris where he writes, “It can be said that man suffers whenever he experiences any kind of evil” (SD 7). He later continues, “We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself.” Ultimately, what is that good? Heaven. And we’re not there yet.
Our petitions shifted during this time. We asked God to miraculously remove the cancer from my Body. We prayed that, if He willed the cancer to remain, He would grant me decades of life to spend with Beth and the children. More than anything, we prayed that He would use this to make me a saint so that I could be with Him in heaven for eternity.
If I could make it to heaven, the suffering of cancer would no longer have hold over me. The scars of surgery would be transformed. There would be no room for anxiety in the presence of God. His love would occupy every ounce of my soul. The more we focused on this goal of sainthood, the less concerned we became with the possibility of surgical excision.
“Lord, you have given us an opportunity to grow closer to you through this cancer. You have allowed our hope of a surgical cure to be taken away so that we may put our hope in You. Blessed be Your name!”
Reflection Questions
When a hope you were holding onto was taken away, how did you respond—emotionally and spiritually?
Where in your life are you being asked to trust God without knowing how the story will end?
Is there a difference between asking God for a cure and asking Him for healing? How do you understand that difference?
What anxieties do you find hardest to surrender to Jesus—and why?
How might God be inviting you into deeper intimacy through a disappointment or loss you did not choose?
What would it look like to place your ultimate hope not in an outcome, but in heaven?
If one of these questions stirred something in you and you feel comfortable sharing, you’re welcome to reflect in the comments. Your words may be a gift to someone else walking a similar road.