How Messages from God Guided Me During My Husband’s Cancer Battle
The following is adapted from Scott’s Choice: Letting Go, Letting God by Elaine Brewster.
Throughout my life, words or ideas occasionally appear in my mind that I know are not of my own making; they don’t emanate from my brain. The earliest one I recall was the day of my first singing contest when I was 17 years old. My first thought of the morning came with absolute clarity: I would win the contest. The notion made me neither arrogant nor flippant.
It just made me glad. I went about my day happily knowing that I would win and was delighted, but not surprised, when I did. Who knows? Maybe it was that very idea that someone in Heaven dropped into my head that made me sing in such a way that I did win the contest.
Many years later, another thought popped into my head, this one about my husband, Scott.
A Shocking Discovery
It was 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 1, 2002. His dark hair tousled, my slender husband, Scott, nudged me awake, saying, “Let’s go to the emergency room. I want them to give me something to take away this pain.” I looked up at him.
His handsome features were scrunched up with some agony that had been hurting terribly for the past few days. Last night he’d tossed in bed all night. Now, preparing to get up, he sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the heel of his right hand against his right rib cage, attempting to push back that hurt. Later, I remembered often seeing this action, long before December.
My 51-year-old husband was concerned about the pain because of a blood clotting condition he’d just discovered he had. On a recent long trip to Australia, he had developed a large blood clot and had found that it was due to a hereditary disorder called factor V Leiden. Factor V is a mutation of one of the clotting factors in the blood that can increase the chance of developing abnormal blood clots. It can even cause death.
Hospital personnel were not so ready to dispense either a blood thinner or pain medication. “We need to find out what this is before we prescribe something for you,” they said. They sent him to have a chest angiography (to check the blood vessels in the chest) and then a CT scan (to check cross-sections of bones as well as soft tissues).
After a while, the doctor on call came back. Folding his hands behind him, he said, “Well, there’s good news and bad news. The pain is not caused by a blood clot.”
“Something on Your Liver”
Scott tangibly relaxed over this good news and smiled thinly.
The doctor went on: “But there’s something on your liver that shouldn’t be there.”
I caught my breath, and Scott unconsciously leaned backward, our world suddenly collapsed to a small, white-sheeted cubicle. Wasn’t the emergency room doctor supposed to wait for the primary care physician or someone else to tell us something unexpected like this? Wasn’t there some way to prepare us? This was not at all why we thought we’d come. What could it be?
Thus started our four-month quest for a cure for the “something” on his liver. Early on, during a phone conversation with my daughter-in-law, Lindsey, two phrases popped unbidden into my mind with a sort of flicker that felt like a déjà vu:
“Scott will make a choice; once chosen, it will be irrevocable.”
Messages from the Same Source
These particular phrases about Scott came from that same heavenly source and stood out with such clarity that I wrote my short experience of receiving them in my journal. Thereafter, I treated them as a portent, paying close attention to see what choices Scott would make.
However, I never told anyone those two phrases. I figured the words meant that Scott would make a choice of treatment, and the treatment would lead toward a certain path, presumably with a healthy outcome. Those words from God’s Spirit, in addition to what Scott asked of me, helped to define our different roles in this venture: mine was to research choices of treatment; his was to choose and, hopefully in the choosing, to get better!
To read more about Elaine and Scott’s journey, you can find Scott’s Choice: Letting Go, Letting God on Amazon.
Elaine Brewster walked by her husband’s side every step of the way throughout his long road to spiritual healing. Several times, she witnessed him come out of a deep sleep, his eyes flying wide as he exclaimed, “I think I signed up for this!” As someone who has long been open to universal energies, Elaine knew from the beginning that Scott would make a choice, and that, once made, that choice would be irrevocable. From his choice to heal, to his ultimate decision to let go, Scott’s Choice: Letting Go, Letting God is her loving chronicle of their journey together.
