After sharing a couple of Nelson’s journal entries from one year ago, we’ll go back to the day when he first heard the word cancer. We’ll see how his emotions responded after being told about it. He had gone to the emergency room after struggling to breathe, while also suffering from sharp pains in other areas of his body. His coughing wouldn’t stop, and getting a doctor to see him quickly on the big Island of Hawaii wasn’t possible. So it was the ER or nothing.

Doctors there admitted him and were in the process of gathering data through tests when Nelson first heard the word cancer. He was alone in a hospital bed, because Ann Sophie was home with newborn Will. Covid restrictions in Hawaii were still extensive, and she was running into problems when trying to visit Nelson in the hospital. But she was determined and ended up finding a nurse who “looked the other way,” allowing her to walk in.

The uncertainty of his symptoms was bad enough, but then he got a phone call with some terrible news.

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May 10 2022

Today is day 2 at the hospital, my second time coming in to the ER because the pain and coughing was so severe. Annso pretty much insisted I do it. I went to campus and taught the Korean Foundation School then came home, ate a nice salad with her and came up here [to the hospital]. 

Once I was here, there was this really young doctor who zeroed right in on fluid in the lungs. Once I told him I was coughing so hard at night and that I was so out of breath, he ran and got a mini-ultrasound machine and found fluid in my heart cavity and lungs. That led them to do tons of tests, including a CT scan showing a tumor or growth in my neck and a few lymph nodes in the lungs about 11 mm at the biggest. 

All of a sudden the fluid makes sense, the cough, and none of it has to do with the thyroid, which is what everyone has been looking at. So the admitting doc calls me on the phone and tells me she really thinks it’s cancer and so does the tech who does these scans all the time.

They will test more tomorrow, including a full body CT scan to see what else is going on. Maybe there are things growing in other places, not that these places aren’t severe enough. 

When she told me that, I could hardly believe it, but at the same time, I could. All the intense pain and coughing now add up. I even said a couple times, “If I was told I had stage 3 lung cancer, I would believe it, because it feels like I think that would feel.”

It’s yet to be confirmed, and I would love for her to be wrong, but everyone is praying and it seems a likely scenario. 

Lots of things come into perspective all of a sudden, but I try not to go worse-case-scenario right away. I think of what happened to Papa and wonder, “Will I be alive this time next year? Will I be alive at Christmas? Will I be alive still even in August?” Unknown for all of us, but especially me.

I don’t know anything, but the people I worry about the most are Annso and Will. What will they do? How hard for them will it be? I would have the easier situation, and they’d be left to pick up the pieces. How terrible. How terrible for her to be turned into a single Mom so soon after our answer to prayer and miracle [baby].

I don’t even want to ask WHY. Doesn’t matter, and no answer will come to that one anyway. I just think of those who went before me and how they did it. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that and I can beat it, whatever “it” is.

God, help me to know what to do now, to be the best man to Annso, strong and optimistic, someone she can rely on and knows what to do, the one who may not know, but knows who to trust. I pray for strength. I pray for healing, for a miracle, for different results on tomorrow’s test. For there to even be a mistake somehow. Thank you for getting Annso in here today. That was a miracle. I pray she gets in tomorrow, too. I pray for supernatural strength for her, too. What will happen to us? To me? To Will? Tomorrow will worry about itself. Amen. 

“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down.” (Proverbs 12:25)