Continued Hope
By Lauren Delk
We all love stories with a happy ending, don’t we? We long to see wrongs made right, relationships work out, and sickness healed. If I would have written my story just a few short years ago, it would have included a breast cancer chapter with a happy ending. But today, my story continues as a 40-year-old wife and mother living with incurable stage IV metastatic breast cancer. My story is now one of choosing hope, peace, and joy, regardless of how the chapter may end.
My cancer journey began a decade ago with an early-stage breast cancer diagnosis when I was 29 years old. Adam and I were newly engaged, and our wedding date that was months away turned into me walking down the aisle just a few weeks after the phone call confirming “It’s cancer.” Most of our first year of marriage was spent in hospitals and waiting rooms. After chemotherapy, a mastectomy, and radiation, I could not have been more ready to see 2015 come to an end. Throughout the next few
years, my hair grew back, and I counted down the years until we would be able to try to start a family. The years were long as I watched my friends have children and many survivor friends begin to have
recurrences. I desperately longed for one scenario and greatly feared the other. But with every year that passed, I became more and more hopeful that I had truly beat cancer.
In 2021, I found out that I was pregnant. I savored every moment of those nine months of carrying our child, constantly marveling at the goodness of God. We chose not to find out if we were having a boy or girl, and it was the best surprise on March 19, 2022, when we welcomed our baby boy, Jackson.
Our first year with him was filled with all of the wonder, joy, and laughter we had hoped for. The verse we chose for Jackson’s life was Psalm 40:3: “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him” (NIV). Jackson’s life was a new song, and I couldn’t have written a more perfect ending if I tried. Nearly nine years had passed, and we were fully embracing this sweet season of life, raising our son with cancer far behind us.
Then, one afternoon with our one-year-old on my lap, cancer violently collided with the happy ending we thought we were living. I reached up and felt a swollen lymph node in my neck, and on November 14, 2023, I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. This is cancer that began in the breast and moved to other parts of the body and is also referred to as MBC, late stage, or stage IV. There was another level of devastation that came with this diagnosis: This form of breast cancer is treatable, but not curable.
In 2015, there was a plan and a cure. This time, there was a plan, but no cure. There is no end date, no timeline, no dates on the calendar to work towards, no last chemo, and no bells to ring. I will be on treatment for the rest of my life, with the goal being to give me more time. How much time? When will this treatment stop working? How old will Jackson be? This remains one of the hardest things to wrestle with while living with stage IV cancer—the constant uncertainty and knowing that the uncertainty does not center around “if,” but “when.”
Most of us operate with an assumption that our lives stretch out before us in decades. We lightheartedly make comments about the future because we assume that we will be a part of it. “When our son graduates” or “When we retire” are brought up commonly in conversation. But with a stage IV cancer diagnosis, you become acutely aware of a life ahead for those you love that does not include you. Though this is my reality, my reality is also that God makes it possible for me to live in this tension, to sit in the uncertainty but not be consumed by fear. He provides for us now, and I trust that He will still be
providing in those years ahead.
One morning as I sat crying in the infusion center, my nurse approached me with an application for the Rainbow Restoration Charity Golf Classic, which benefits local mothers battling stage IV cancer. Applications were due the following day, and I was ecstatic when I received the call from Heather Mattingly, the tournament coordinator, that I had been selected as a beneficiary. The impact that this event and community continues to have on our family is indescribable. It taught us early on to notice God’s presence and provision above all else.
Today, nearly three years later, I am immensely grateful to still be on my first line of treatment. I have been present for big and small moments as a mom, from potty training to the first day of preschool. We were able to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary and my 40th birthday together. I have scans several times a year to monitor the effectiveness of this treatment, with our hope being that we will see stability and no progression of the cancer. When there is progression, a new line of treatment will
be necessary. Treatments are limited, and when options run out, so does time.
Only a small percentage of funds raised for breast cancer are actually allocated for research to help develop treatments that are desperately needed in the MBC community. If you are looking for a way to make a meaningful impact this October, please consider donating to MBC research through an organization called METAvivor. Furthermore, one in three women diagnosed with early-stage
breast cancer will have a later recurrence, regardless of early detection. When you support this research, you are helping not only those of us currently living with MBC, but potentially someone else you know who was diagnosed at an earlier stage.
Although this new song looks nothing like we imagined, we trust that it does not have to have a happy ending to be beautiful. If we stay in today and continue trusting Christ, we will always have enough.
When hope cannot be found in an outcome, a cure, or a happy ending, this becomes the gift worth cherishing— just one more day to be a wife, mom, daughter, sister, and friend.
