Here We Go (Again)

On February 23, 2025, I woke up at 3 a.m. to a text message from my daughter Lena. She was 22 years old.

“Mom, I’m at the ER. They found a large mass in my chest.”

Just a few months earlier, Lena had moved from Tampa to Pittsburgh to attend graduate school. Shortly after the move, she began experiencing some odd symptoms and had been bounced from one doctor to another. No one seemed to have answers.

Until that night in the ER.

While I frantically booked a flight and threw things into a suitcase, my friend went to the hospital to sit with Lena until I could get there. I called her, trying not to panic.

“Lena is telling me they mentioned a blood clot. What exactly is going on?”

There was a pause.

“Are you sitting down?” my friend gently asked.

There are certain moments in life when time seems to stop. Moments when you remember exactly where you were standing, what you were doing, what the room looked like when you heard the words that divided your life into before and after.

I remember exactly where I was standing when I learned that the mass in Lena’s chest was cancer.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” I wailed into the phone.

This cannot be happening. Again.

I have two daughters. Five years earlier, my oldest daughter, Rosa, had fought a brutal battle with Hodgkin lymphoma that almost killed her. And now my younger daughter was lying in an emergency room with a mass in her chest.

It seemed inconceivable. It was too much. I could almost feel my mind shutting down, unwilling to absorb what I was hearing.

Hours later when I finally arrived at the ER and saw her lying there, connected to machines and in so much pain, something inside me broke.

I physically felt it. And all I could do was hold her and cry.

I wish I could tell you that I walked into that hospital room stoic and strong, armed with the perfect words of faith. I didn’t. I was a mother whose heart had just shattered, crushed beneath the weight of this new reality.

They graciously allowed me to ride with Lena in the ambulance for the hour-long trip to a larger hospital where she would undergo further testing. That hospital stay would eventually stretch to nearly a month.

One test followed another. Then came the biopsy.

The surgeon went into Lena’s chest through her lung to retrieve a piece of the fast-growing tumor pressing against her lung and getting dangerously close to her heart.

What followed were two days I will never forget.

A chest tube had been inserted to drain fluid from her lung, and the pain was excruciating. Lena moaned in agony for two days. Even the slightest movement could send another wave through her body.

Her dad and I took turns holding her, shifting her ever so slightly from one position to another, desperately trying to find some way to give her relief. The pain medication wasn’t working. Doctors tried one drug and then another.

I remember looking at her in that hospital bed. She looked so small. Pale. Frail. Crumpled into the one position that finally allowed her to sleep for a few precious hours.

And then came the biopsy results. Hodgkin lymphoma.

The same cancer she had watched her older sister battle just five years earlier. And now Lena had it.

Oh, my God. Lena has it…how can this be?

Lena already knew what this diagnosis could mean. She had watched Rosa endure chemotherapy. She knew what cancer could take from a person.

In some strange way, there was comfort in knowing what we were facing. But there was also tremendous dread in knowing what we were facing.

I resisted the reality at first. Maybe that was my mind’s way of protecting itself. Maybe I simply couldn’t absorb another daughter going through this.

But one day, reality punched me square between the eyes.

They wheeled Lena back to me after surgery to place her chemotherapy port. I remember staring at the incision on my daughter’s chest while a nurse explained how we would care for it. I barely heard her. All I could see was that device beneath Lena’s skin – the port that would soon deliver the horrible, wonderful drugs we were praying would kill the cancer.

It was then that I accepted it: This is really happening.

For the next two and a half months, many of my prayers to God came in the form of silence. They were there, but they lived quietly in the deepest corners of my heart, in places where only God could reach them. Sometimes the only words I could manage were, “Why?” and “How can this be?”

I brought my aching heart to God and simply sat with Him.

Looking back through my journal now, I can see the drought. There are long stretches where I barely wrote at all. And writing is one of the ways I process life. It is one of the places where I meet God. But I couldn’t even do that.

I was overwhelmed. Exhausted. And underneath all of it, deeply, deeply heartbroken.

Eventually, words began to return. And when I read those journal entries now, I notice two things: first, I was painfully honest with God. And second, God continually used His Word to strengthen me.

Early in Lena’s diagnosis, God placed Deuteronomy 31:8 on my heart:

The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.

I wrote the verse on a little scrap of paper and kept it close. Sometimes I would fall asleep with it clutched in my hand, repeating the words over and over.

The Lord Himself goes before you.

Those words became an anchor for me. God was reminding me that He was already ahead of us in a future I could not see, and yet somehow, at the very same time, He was sitting beside me in the pain of the present.

He had not abandoned me. And He had not abandoned Lena.

When the question How can this be? threatened to consume me, God brought me to another passage:

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair… struck down, but not destroyed. (2 Corinthians 4:8-9)

Perplexed.

Yes. That was exactly how I felt.

I did not understand. But I did not have to understand everything in order to trust God.

One particularly difficult day, when I felt tired from walking through what seemed like the deepest, darkest valley, I came across words from Corrie ten Boom, a woman whose faith I have admired for years:

“Look around and be distressed.
Look within and be depressed.
Look at Jesus and be at rest.”

Those words brought light into a very dark place.

Again and again, God met me through His Word:

Cling tightly to the Lord your God. (Joshua 23:8)

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. (Psalm 28:7)

Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. (Ephesians 6:10)

And this one:

You have allowed me to suffer much hardship, but you will restore me to life again and lift me up from the depths of the earth. (Psalm 71:20)

I could fill pages with the Scriptures God used to carry me during that season. There are countless hospital stories, chemotherapy days, prayers, tears, small miracles and acts of kindness I could share.

But this is a blog, not a book. 😊 So let me fast-forward to the part I once could barely allow myself to imagine.

We are about to celebrate one year of NED – No Evidence of Disease. Or, as I like to call it: NED Day. Those three words were once among the most desperately prayed-for words in my vocabulary.

I am forever grateful for the doctors, nurses and healthcare workers who cared for Lena, and for the family and friends who prayed, cooked, called, texted, visited, cried with us and carried us when we were tired.

But most of all, I am grateful to the God who never left us.

God’s faithfulness did not begin when that PET scan came back clear. He was faithful at 3 a.m. when Lena texted me from the emergency room. He was faithful when I sat crying on that airplane. He was faithful before I knew how the story would end.

That is what I want you to know if you are walking through your own valley today.

Maybe your valley isn’t cancer. Maybe it’s grief, financial fear, loneliness, a dream that died, or a prayer that still hasn’t been answered.

Whatever it is, take your pain to God.

Bring Him your tears. Bring Him your questions. Bring Him your anger. Bring Him your silence. Bring Him you.

I have learned something in the darkest valleys of my life: The heart of God is always faithful.

That does not mean He promises to spare us from every tragedy or remove every painful circumstance. But He promises His presence.

God does not always preserve us from difficulty; sometimes He preserves us in it.

Paul described a season of suffering this way:

…the troubles we went through…we were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it…but as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God. (2 Corinthians 1; 8-9)

I understand those words differently now, because there were moments during Lena’s cancer battle when I reached the end of myself. And at the end of myself, I discovered again that I was never carrying the burden alone.

God was already ahead of me.

God was with me.

And He was faithful.

He still is.

Wanna pray?

Heavenly Father, hold us close in the valleys and give us faith to trust You when we cannot understand what You are doing. When fear, pain, and disappointment threaten to overwhelm us, remind us that You have gone before us and that You are still right here beside us. Help us cling tightly to You and rest in the truth that Your heart is always faithful. Amen.