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'LABISI: Chronicles of a Breast Cancer Warrior

CHAPTER 4

Journal entry by Karen Delgado-5/7/2010

‘On my way to school, I was listening to 99.1FM and I heard this song (and yes, it made me cry). I’ll highlight the lyrics that were especially meaningful. Also…last week at my church, the sermon was about healing. It is part of an ongoing series, ‘God, why?’ This message was, ‘God, why are some people healed and not others? (Luke 13:1-5) and it was preached by Jeremy Moore….
I can honestly say that I’m glad to have gone through this journey…I’ve learned so much…and continued to experience just how faithful and trust worthy God is. If a miraculous healing would have happened, I would have lost out on experiencing the truth of God’s word- that he is aware of all that is happening…that He will be there…that He will provide for our every need…that he is a God of Comfort…but I would have also missed out on learning just how wonderful it is to experience the love of the people around me.'  
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YOU KNOW, when you’re watching certain movies like Fast and Furious, it gets to a point where you don’t even understand it anymore but you keep watching it anyways, because you are assured that the good guy would win (in this case, the good team), regardless of what happens during the movie?
Well, yeah.
I got diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago. I was only a 13-year-old girl when mum died, but there was one thing I determined I wouldn’t let happen to me; and this was it: I wouldn’t let myself die of a disease I could catch early and treat. Because I now had a first degree relative who had died of breast cancer, you can understand that I was now someone who had a high risk of developing the same.
When I turned forty- which was three years ago, Mr. Okonkwo (my husband), threw this really huge party for his ‘Yoruba bride’, as he likes to call me. I enjoyed this party, thoroughly. But it brought one thing to my mind; and that was my mother. I had somehow pushed to the recesses of my mind, these 27 years; what had led to her death but fondly remembered her and all those great memories etched in my memory about her remained.
But that night, reality knocked on my heart. I was forty. I needed to have a mammogram done. No, I didn’t want to! I wanted to do nothing about it- and hope I could wish it away. I spoke to myself, asked myself hard questions: Did I want my kids to grow up motherless? My daughter, Kachi was 12 years old, almost the same age I was when mum died, and I know how hard it was coping without her. Would I want to do the same to her brothers and herself?
And so, with literally heavy legs, I carried myself to the hospital and had the mammogram done, silently hoping that it would be negative, praying it would be negative, confessing that it would be negative.
2 weeks later, my hands were firmly placed over my mouth when I heard the result of my screening. I had tested positive; turns out there was this gene that ran in my family and of course, I had inherited it from my mum. I was in shock for about 5 days, and I began to act the way my mum had acted before her death- running from pillar to post in search of a miracle cure. None came my way.
One night, I sat in the living room, all by myself, weeping. “God, why?” I had done all I knew how to do, and I still had breast cancer. Why wasn’t I healed? Why? I had no answers that night.
The next morning, we went to church and the preaching bothered on healing, and why some people were healed, why some didn’t receive their healing immediately. I didn’t get everything the pastor said, but I held tightly to one scripture
‘The light affliction which is but for a moment worketh a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory in me…’
Hmmmn; somehow I knew that I would survive this and come out on the other end victorious.
How? I didn’t know; but somehow, I did know.

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