Saturday, July 18, 1998

A cancer survivor puts her life in God's hands

By Eric Adler

Knight Ridder Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Mary Wadick has a saying these days: "My organs are in God's hands."

She prays that he'll keep them healthy because she so hopes to be married one day and dreams of having children. But then in February, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In March she had a mastectomy.

As a nurse at St. Luke's Hospital, Wadick had heard the phrase countless times. But she never dared believe it would refer to her.

At age 49, her mother had breast cancer. The ordeal was crushing. It virtually destroyed her parents' marriage, devastated her mother's sense of beauty and, although it didn't kill her, brought on years of emotional suffering.

After Wadick's biopsy, in the recovery room and later, these and so many other thoughts swirled through her mind. She's only 37. Would she live? Would she die? Would she need radiation? Would anyone ever want to be with her? What of chemotherapy?

"I just trembled," Wadick says, "I pulled the sheet over my head and cried."

Then she searched out God.

Raised Catholic, Wadick had fallen away from organized religion. And for a time, she considered herself agnostic. But in the year before she got cancer, she had begun to re-examine her spiritual life. In Overland Park, Kan., she had gone to Unity Temple every so often and found great comfort in the message that God, in all his love, is manifest in every individual.

Days before Easter, Wadick found herself sitting in church. Her doctors were asking her to make a decision. The bulk of her cancer, along with her breast, was gone. But to be certain, they were recommending chemotherapy whose ravages Wadick knew only too well. There would be intense sickness. She would lose her hair.

"I was feeling so sorry for myself," she says. "I was terrified. I was in angst. I thought I didn't want that poison going through my body."

But then the sermon began. It was the tale of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, alone, afraid, beseeching God to deliver him from the persecution he knew he would soon endure.

After the service ended and everyone left, Wadick remained behind. The minister, spotting her sitting alone, came to her side. Wadick sobbed in grief until, gently, the minister took up her hands and began to pray.

"She prayed for my perfect health," Wadick says, the thought still bringing tears to her eyes. "We held hands. It felt wonderful. I prayed, 'Jesus if you can do this, I can do this; we can do this.' It was the beginning of my turning my life over to God and surrendering my life to God."

Wadick, of course, can't say if her devotion will help make her better. To be sure, she is well-aware of the growing body of studies showing the positive health affects of deep religious faith.

What she is sure about, however, is that her daily prayers, her classes at church, her Sunday devotions and the thought that God's love is working every moment within her, are powerful forces in her ability to cope. They give her peace. They give her hope.

"I feel I was scattered," she says. "I feel God took a big fishing pole and reeled me in and said, 'Hey, sister, time to talk and get close to me because you're going to need me."

Three weeks ago Wadick received her last dose of chemotherapy. Her hair should be growing back soon. For that, she's grateful. But she knows it's not over. Soon she'll begin taking tamoxifen, a drug designed to suppress tumor cell growth and which she will have to take for the next five years.

But the drug's anti-estrogen effects also can have lasting side effects, such as preventing her from having children, which is why, she says, "My organs are in God's hands."

"I feel my saving grace now," Wadick says, "is to get as close to God as I possibly can. I believe I am cured. And I know I can have a recurrence. I just want to get so centered in God that if that happens, I'll be at peace.

"I just know that without God, I would have gone crazy."

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(c) 1998, The Kansas City Star.

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