Day 23: Cancer Cures and Healing

I’ve had many people suggest that they have a cure for Tillery’s tumor. People have given insight on certain vitamins, essential oils, organic fruits and veggies, and other homeopathic remedies. People have sent articles on new drugs and new treatments they have seen or read about. While I appreciate everyone thinking of us and looking out for Tillery, I want you to also know that we have a full trust in her medical team. Not only does her team review her scans, look at the exact pathology of her tumor, and study the research that exists, they also are leading research on low grade gliomas – Tillery’s tumor type.

I have had people send me messages claiming they have a cure. Most of the time, I go through and read over the research I can find on the claim they are making. I want to make sure I look over every possible thing that could help. Sometimes, though, I need you to know that it hurts. To tell a mom who has watched her daughter suffer through surgeries and treatments that you can solve all of her problems with a small vial of oil can really be hurtful. Do you think I’m ignoring easy fixes and jumping to horrible alternatives first? No!

I have been sent some “shaky at best” research about medical claims. It is probably easy to make those statements without having lived in our world. I’ll bet if it was your child, you’d want some much stronger research than a lot of what has been sent my way.

I also want to do a little education on “drug trials” and “new technologies”. Imagine your child has a giant mass in her head. It’s so large that it has increased her head size and is protruding out of the soft spot on top of her head. If you had the option to go with a treatment plan that has been used for a long time with good results or try something new without much data to back it up, what would you chose? This is my child’s brain. There is no more space in her head. No room for slight growth, no room for trial and error.

Drug trials are important. They lead to new medications that could be tomorrow’s best option. Here’s the other side of the coin, though. When we try a new chemo, we get a list of potential side effects. With Tillery’s current chemo, the side effects are very mild. When this chemo stops working, the next option is a chemo that causes leukemia. LEUKEMIA! Fix one cancer just to pick up a second kind? But that’s our next option. And you know what, that’s still a better option than the next drug after that, which is a drug trial with no long term research. What if it also causes leukemia? What if it causes something even worse? How do you make decisions like that?

Here’s how we do it, the way we make our choices in medical options without the training…we trust our doctors and we put our full trust in our Lord, Jesus Christ. He is often called the Great Physician or Great Healer. That doesn’t mean that we do nothing medically and wait on Him to work a miracle. It means we find a medical team that we trust and we pray that He will guide us and them in making decisions about Tillery’s care.

God can do all things. We believe that. He can heal Tillery. We believe that. We also know that His healing may not look like what we want it to look like. It might be hard, it might hurt, it might seem like it’s too much. We live in an imperfect world and not everything has an easy fix. It’s okay. We accept that. We accept where we are.

It is with full trust in our Lord, the Great Healer, that I say, if Tillery lives her whole life with a mass in her head, He has been faithful. If her tumor is one day able to be removed, He has been faithful. If she does not survive this, He has been faithful.

We do our research. We trust our team. We trust our God.


*Please feel free to send ideas, suggestions, or research our way. I just ask you to think of the way you phrase things. Please don’t tell us you have a cure when you don’t even know the medical details of Tillery’s case.