Question for People who Pray

Yuri Kugach. His work is great. See more here

People who pray, I'd be interested in your thoughts on this one.

I have cancer surgery scheduled for today. On the sliding scale, it's not super scary surgery. My last biopsy results were neither "benign" nor "malignant" but rather "cannot rule out cancer" so more stuff will be removed today and studied. Everything is predicted to be brief and not-too-traumatic.

Even so I'm worried. I grew up with horrifying tales of my maternal grandmother dying young, slowly, and painfully of cancer. My mother would tell stories of how her mother cried out in pain, and they wouldn't give her more pain killers, because she might become addicted, and my mother shouting at them, "She's dying! So what if she becomes addicted?"

When I heard those tales, I almost inhabited the white, sterile, cold American hospital room where this woman of the poppy-strewn fields and mammal-rich mountains of Slovakia slowly and painfully breathed her last. I would become so outraged at the American doctors who tortured her to death and so terrified that that would be my own fate, because "it runs in the family."

The "it" of the above sentence is, I think, not cancer, but some banshee curse. Oh, stop, D, look on the bright side. Okay.

I was by my own mother's bed as she died of cancer, holding her hand, wiping her tears, feeling her life escape from her body like a wild bird that had been in a cage far too long.

And by the bed of my brother Mike, and my sister Antoinette.

So, yeah, scared, but today's surgery is low-risk and everyone has high hopes that the new biopsy results will not be ultra-scary.

Yesterday I was standing in the kitchen. I had just eaten breakfast and finished washing the dishes. I suddenly realized, with some horror, that one of my bodily organs was malfunctioning. I turned to everyone's favorite doctor, google, and discovered that I needed to get to a doctor, pronto. I did. The news I received was not horrible, but not great, either. I need to be watched and this rather beloved bodily organ may never function as well again.

So. I came back and all these wonderful people on Facebook said they had been praying for me. I knew that they had. They knew about surgery today. And, in the midst of all that prayer, God smote a totally unrelated bodily organ.

I'm not asking the big questions. I know about what's going on in Syria, Iraq, North Korea. I'm asking about me, a woman awash in prayer, who just lost the full functioning of one of her favorite bodily organs.

I don't know the answer.

I do know that after I left the doctor's office, I did pray my daily rosary. It's a discipline. No matter how pissed off, confused, or devastated I am, I pray those same prayers.

God, I showed up.

Gotta go.