My Personal Pearl Harbor

‍ ‍I was a civilian nurse based at Tripler Army Medical Center, that grand fourteen story “Pink Palace of the Pacific.”  The medical center is a coral-colored landmark, perched on a ridge and visible to much of Honolulu. I was so proud to serve as Team Leader for a mobile care unit providing medical services to military families. My twenty-mile territory stretched from Schofield Air Base down to Pearl Harbor.

Mobile family care was a new venture for the military. Ranking medical officers viewed its’ early success in Hawaii as a blueprint for expanding these care units to the mainland… for the good of the military and perhaps for their own professional betterment. 

My days were unscripted. Tasks could range from checking the lungs of a toddler at one house, listening for heart irregularities of a live-in grandmother at the next, and sadly, investigating claims of child and spousal abuse with family members and law enforcement. We were engaged in all aspects of family care…  even down to arranging babysitters or deliveries of groceries from food banks.

For me, this job was ideal. I was not military, but did have the equivalent status of Captain. I had the freedom to plan my daily routes, freedom to act independently in the care of my assigned families and sometimes just enjoy the  incredible views of the Pacific Ocean as I made my household visitations. As I sat behind the wheel on the road down to Pearl Harbor, little did I know that soon I would experience a devastating surprise attack of my own.

I was feeling lousy and the diagnostic team at Tripler had yet to pinpoint the problem. I signed a consent form where exploratory surgery would be done and I authorized the team to take all steps necessary to fix whatever the problem was while I was in the operating room. I awoke in Recovery to find my ob/gyn, a friend and colleague, sitting there bawling her eyes out. She told me that I had ovarian cancer, a diagnosis that in those days she knew to be a death sentence. 

I told her and everyone else in the chain of command that I was not going to die from ovarian cancer, though I had watched other women go home to that fate. After two to three years and many transfusions later they ultimately would bleed to death. At that time, there were no records of survivors. Even though my superiors thought I was delusional by steadfastly proclaiming that I was not going die, I continued to work, while simultaneously undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. 

I loved my job and I knew that when I had finally beaten the five-year survival threshold, I still would want to become a parent. I even made a bet with my ranking medical officers that I’d  be alive after those five years. When that time came about, I told them I’d collect their signatures on both my “cancer free” certification , and my International Adoption papers. I’m sure they must have been thinking, “ even more delusional thinking coming from our Team Leader.”

I felt that my commanding officers would have peace of mind only if I’d just give up my position. This, so that our showcase of a program could be put under a new leader without such an abbreviated life expectancy. Uncertainty was not a welcome partner in this environment, but to the credit of my leadership and earning my deepest gratitude, they put no hurdles in my quest to remain at work.

Even the psyche evaluation folks were baffled that I would not acknowledge the possibility of death, where death by their objective experience seemed a certainty. I would just insist that this was a thing between God and me and I wasn’t going to die of ovarian cancer. I continued to say this for the next five years. And after those years, with a wink in my eye, I collected on my bet. The command officers gracefully signed my five-year cancer free affidavit and certified my eligibility to apply for an international adoption.

Five-year survival rates are part of how cancer survivorship is measured. God placed me in this five-year mission field and I knew God doesn’t make mistakes. Despite all of the expressed fatalism within the military medical community, they got their proven family care program and I got our ten-month-old Jared. Though medical science believes  one thing, that may not be the will of God. I got the miracle of keeping my own life while receiving the life of a child. Not just one miracle….but two….