Miracle of God

Anna Oliver‘s hands grip the sides of the exam table, knuckles white and palms sweaty from squeezing so hard. She sits and waits for the news, for the results she’s scared to hear because she’s been fearing the worst. She hears a knock at the door right before it creaks open. The doctor pokes his head in and she can immediately sense his apprehension, she can see the anguish in his eyes. He sits down on his chair with his head down and he slowly looks up at her. Looking her right in the eyes, he bears the news she’s been fearing. Her heart drops. She knows her life will never be the same.

Her life got turned upside-down on November 17, 2000, when she was diagnosed with Anaplastic Large T-Cell non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. This form of Lymphoma occurs when cells of the immune system called lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell, grow and multiply uncontrollably. Cancer can drain you, physically and mentally, taking you away from life as you knew it.

She took the dangerous risk of still receiving chemotherapy treatments while she was pregnant with her third child, Elianna. She was one of the lucky ones, because although Anna had no hair as a result of the chemotherapy, Elianna was born that January healthy with a full head of hair.

Elianna was a miracle baby.

Anna went in for a few more chemotherapy treatments after Elianna was born, and it proved to be worth it, on February 16, 2001, when she went into remission.

A stipulation with Anaplastic Large T-Cell non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is that it can never be fully cured. But, the risk for recurrence is low after five years of being in remission.

That information was reassuring to the Oliver’s, and five years later everything with Anna was perfect and there were no signs of the cancer anywhere.

Life in the Oliver family was mostly back to normal, they were back to doing their usual tight-knit family activities, activities that were unable to be done between all of the chemotherapy sessions and hospital visits.

Little did they know, after nine and a half years of being in remission, on June 22, 2009, Annas Lymphoma relapsed.

The second time, just doing chemotherapy and nothing else isn’t an option. Thats when all the really tough stuff like stem cell transplants and radiation come into play.

She started off with two inpatient stays for serious chemotherapy at a hospital in Kansas City. After that, she had to spend a month at a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska for a stem cell transplant of her own cells.

A month away from her kids, her husband, her friends, and everything she’d been used to.

Once she got back to Kansas City, she had another month of radiation treatments.

Late September that year, she went to a check-up where they declared her in remission once again. She’s been clean for three and a half years now.

Of all of the misconceptions most people believe about cancer, the one that Anna really wants to clear up is that cancer is all negative.

“You can find hope in cancer.” Anna said. “Just have a positive attitude and there will be a positive outcome. You don’t get to choose what happens, you just have to learn to deal with it.”

Dealing with it is what the Oliver’s had to learn to  do very quickly during these few years. Not only did it affect Anna, it affected the kids as well.

Although there were quite a few hardships the family had to encounter during these few years, the hardest issue was common throughout the three kids.

“The absolute hardest part for me was only getting to see my mom on weekends,” Anna’s oldest son Corbett said. “ It was hard having her basically live in Omaha because we had to travel just to see her.”

Delaney and Elianna, Annas’ daughters, agree with Corbett.

Through experiences similar to those that the Olivers had to go through, keeping a strong faith in The Lord can be difficult. Despite that, all five of them included something about how God helped them through it.

The hope needed to overcome this experience was kept through their faith in The Lord.

“We are all here by the grace of God,” Anna’s husband Brad said. “My wife survived by the grace of God.”