💌 413. When did this unfamiliar friend called cancer start accompanying me?

The faltering steps that I took towards the bus stop felt as heavy as a thousand tons. With my anus filled with lumps of cancer, even walking steadily was impossible. The mere fact that other people were watching me walking awkwardly and grotesquely with my legs apart, made me feel more miserable than facing death itself. Yet, I had to return home. So, what else could I have done?

I offered it up with Semchigo as if my husband were there to help me and as if nobody had ever seen me walk miserably like that. But the following thought never left my mind: 'When did this unfamiliar friend called cancer come to me who used to be so healthy?' I was convinced that it definitely had not occurred over a short period of time. Suddenly, a medical test result crossed my mind – the one that I received at Yeongam Daesung Hospital some time ago.

A few months earlier, I had a medical malpractice during an appendectomy at Jeonnam University Hospital, where the doctors finished the operation with some gauze left inside my abdomen. As a result, the gauze burst out of it later, leading to the intestinal adhesions and the constant oozing of blood and pus from my surgical site. I received treatment at Gunseo Hospital for three months and I even went to an oriental medicine clinic, but all those treatments did not work at all. So, I had visited to Yeongam Daesung Hospital and received a blood test there.

Even though I experienced a serious medical accident involving gauze coming out of my abdomen and intestinal adhesion, within just a few months, the test results from that time were already so severe that it is hard to believe there could have been such rapid progress within just a few months.

Regrettably, it was not possible to tell from the blood test whether I had cancer. Still, at that time, my liver function had deteriorated significantly with elevated liver enzymes and inflammation markers. In addition, the doctor said that my overall physical function had deteriorated considerably.

How shocked I was to hear that my liver was failing! It was said that liver damage typically occurs gradually without noticeable symptoms, so the illness is discovered when it reaches an irreversible stage. This made me suspect that the decline in my liver function was not a recent development in a year or two, triggering a sense of foreboding.

Above all, I recalled the point when my overall health including liver function started deteriorating rapidly. It coincided exactly with a period when I had my first miscarriage in the second month of pregnancy due to the hard labor that continued every day while living in my parents-in-law's house, a large household and the inhospitality and mistreatment that I received from my parents-in-law.

Even after that, I had to continuously come up with the money for my mother-in-law, which left me almost penniless. So, I could not afford to visit a local clinic, let alone an OBGY clinic, only enduring five months of profuse bleeding and almost reaching the brink of death. Then, my mother provided me with herbal medicine and only after taking it, my bleeding stopped. Yet, though I was in so much pain that it felt like I could die, I did private hairdressing, inhaling the strong smell of perm solution to come up with the money for my mother-in-law. Then, I ended up collapsing and dying!

I was utterly dead to the point where I had excreted all my urine and feces but when my mother shook me to wake me up, I heard a kind and soft voice saying, "Wake up quickly." (*It was Jesus’ voice) Then, I regained my consciousness faintly, but I could not move an inch. Then, the voice said again, "Should you not wake up and finish what you have been doing?" (Jesus’ voice) Then my eyes opened wide and I barely managed to come back to life.

Since then, I had been in such poor health for about seven years to the point where I often wondered, ‘How on earth have I managed to live my life so far?’ Could my extremely poor health be ascribed to cancer? Additionally, another memory suddenly came to mind: when my second child turned 10 months old, white spots suddenly appeared on my nipples.

A while later, it felt like they were connected to the inner part of my breasts like a tendon, which caused me excruciating pain each time my child suckled, as if my whole body were being sucked in, thereby making me even think it might be breast cancer. The time when I suspected it might be cancer was very close to the period when I had the miscarriage and died from massive bleeding. Of course, I do not know exactly when my cancer started.

However, my overall condition was so serious that, for the first time in my life, I thought it might be cancer. The reasons for developing cancer are diverse. I could not pinpoint the exact reason and from where, when, and how the cancer originated. Still, when I thought about everything that I had experienced so far, I felt that the cancer that was pulling me towards death probably started when I suffered the bleeding for five months from the miscarriage.

Given the fact that my days were numbered, which was like a death sentence for me and especially considering the terminal cancer that had spread all over my body from throat to anus and toes, it could not have developed in just a few months. Besides, I, a relatively young woman, used to be much healthier than vigorous men, but failed to recover from my illness, no matter how much seriously I was sick. For a prolonged period of suffering the pains of death without recovery, there must be underlying reasons indicating that my illness is not trivial.

It gave me goosebumps to think that death had been slowly establishing itself within me over those long years, expanding its power to take over me. “What should I do now?” Seized with despair, I got on the bus headed for Gunseo. On the way back home, nothing came into my head shrouded in darkness but a three-letter word ‘God’.

‘Now, what could I possibly do?’ No treatment would work and my days were numbered with no means available to save my life. When I peered into the looking-glass in the bus, a pale and ashen lady was peering back at me.

She was just looking unfamiliar. A girl who wore a brilliant smile like a lively red rose faded away. Instead, a pale and frail woman completely consumed by illness was looking back at me.