January–June 2017
Over the years we’ve shared tens of thousands of personal development tips on our radio programs. When you are bathed in that much “intelligence,” you start to recognize patterns that can produce pathways to success. One of the common pieces of advice is to frequently look back on your life—at your successes and failures—and connect the dots to see how you ended up at your current destination. Writing this memoir required much personal dot-connecting, especially when it came to tracking my growth in the world of divine healing. That process enabled me to see, from altitude, this incredible timeline of my cancer journey and, ultimately, divine healing. Take a look.
• The demonic spirit of infirmity (cancer) attacks my body.
• Satan begins to prowl and devour my mind. He attacks me with doubt, unbelief, and anger.
• Then Connie finds Jack Hibbs on the radio.
• Connie announces she’s headed to his church. I tag along.
• Cha Cha Sandoval-McMahon shows up on our doorstep. She later hands us the Wommack healing CD.
• The true promise of Mark 11:23 is then revealed to us: “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.”
• Our revelation on healing begins.
The Holy Spirit had set Connie and me along a path of understanding supernatural healing. And just in the nick of time, because in January 2017—eighteen months after the all-clear from Dr. Schaeffer—during a routine quarterly MRI scan, something lit up among the lymph nodes in my pelvic area.
A two-hour biopsy revealed that there was likely cancer present in the chain of lymph nodes near the surgical site (formerly known as my prostate). Schaeffer, who had become head of urology at Northwestern in Chicago since becoming my doctor, recommended that I see an oncologist.
I knew enough about prostate cancer at this point to know that my cancer had likely matriculated into a candidate for what was known as systemic treatment—treating your entire system, your whole body—which made my heart sink.
Would it be chemo? Radiation? More surgery? I was gripped by a more intense fear than any I had faced even in the darkest moments of my cancer battle in 2015. It was a fear that would regularly test my faith in the path of divine healing that I had just recently set upon with Connie. It would also test my faith in the medicine that, to date, I had relied upon and given credit to for saving my life.
We were again on the hunt for another specialist. This time, an oncologist dedicated to diagnosing, treating, and researching cancer. The indefatigable Connie was able to make a connection to MD Anderson in Houston and a world-renowned specialist in prostate cancer named Dr. Christopher Logothetis, “Logo” to his team. Logo quickly recommended another robotic surgery to remove an entire section of lymph nodes in my pelvis—a “lymph node salvage.” The plan was to harvest nodes that Dr. Schaeffer’s team regarded as possibly cancerous. Then Logo would study the nodes to determine what kind of cancer I had and what treatment I should receive.
Mine was a rare, non-PSA-producing metastatic prostate cancer. It was prolific and aggressive. By now you may have guessed that when cancer moves from its epicenter in the body, when it metastasizes, it will likely continue to move until it is stopped by chemotherapy or radiation or both. That’s why Logo prescribed four rounds of chemotherapy and something called ADT (androgen deprivation therapy). The drug used for ADT is designed to remove all of the testosterone from your body because prostate cancer thrives on that hormone. The idea is to suck out all your male hormone, thus weakening the cancer cells, which are then killed by the chemotherapy.
I’d faced terrible side effects in my first battle with cancer. However, I was not at all prepared to hear the grisly side effects manifested by the ADT this time, which included muscle loss, overall weight loss, and extreme fatigue. My violent reactions to the chemotherapy treatments were so horrible that every means used to ameliorate the nausea were virtually useless. On the rare occasions I would feel well enough to go out to a restaurant, Connie would cheerfully say, “Oh no, let ME cook tonight.”
I had lost so much weight she knew I would be a shocking image in a public place.
Soon enough, I found myself slipping back into a familiar headspace, that of a cancer patient. I spoke like a cancer patient. I even referred to the disease as “my cancer.” I was a terrible patient. I would go from feeling pitiful and feeling sorry for myself, to experiencing the guilt of costing my family so much of their lives. My thoughts often drifted into plans for suicide (perhaps my exercise kettlebells strapped to my ankles and a quick jump into the pool would do the trick). Then I would show up at the hospital for more treatments and there would be little kids walking the halls with five more IVs than I had, and they would be smiling, fighting for their lives. It only made me feel worse, because I was weak. Suffering is personal. You don’t really care where you are on the spectrum, or who is there with you.
A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning1
Fortunately, Connie and I had acquired new weapons for this fight, and we had received serious training for how to use them. We had learned that most people, in attempting to exercise the authority of Jesus as Scripture describes in Mark 11:23, speak to God about their mountain instead of speaking to their mountain about God. So we had begun to think and act differently. We understood that there was a better way to pray. We exercised our authority over the thoughts that came into our minds, and we spoke to the ailment itself. For example, if the problem was pain, we said, “Pain, in the name of Jesus, I command you to leave my body.”
I was learning this lesson firsthand, from my own experience, because even though I was walking further and further down the path of divine healing, I was still periodically trying to twist God’s arm to force Him to take this cancer from me. And if it wasn’t God Himself I was begging, it was the god of modern medicine to whom, in the first half of 2017, I was giving more (or most) of my faith.
I knew that I could pray the better way. I could speak to the pain, to the cancer, to the infirmity, in the name of Jesus. I also felt I could not give half of my heart to science and half to the Word. As they say, when you sit in the middle of the road, that’s when you get run over.
At some point, I was going to have to make a choice. The question was not if, only when.