A New Song

By Lauren Delk

We all love stories with a happy ending, don’t we?

We long to see wrongs made right, relationships work out, and sickness healed. If I would have written my story just a few short years ago, it would have included a breast cancer chapter with a happy ending. But today, my story continues as a 39-year-old wife and mother living with incurable stage IV metastatic breast cancer. My story is now one of choosing hope, peace, and joy regardless of how the chapter will end.

My cancer journey began a decade ago with an early stage breast cancer diagnosis when I was 29 years old. Adam and I were newly engaged, and our wedding date that was months away turned into me walking down the aisle just a few weeks after the phone call confirming “it's cancer.” Most of our first year of marriage was spent in hospitals and waiting rooms. After chemotherapy, a mastectomy, and radiation, I could not have been more ready to see 2015 come to an end. Throughout the next few years, my hair

grew back and I counted down the years until we would be able to try to start a family. The years were long as I watched my friends have children and many survivor friends begin to have recurrences. I desperately longed for one scenario and greatly feared the other. But with every year that passed, I became more and more hopeful that I had truly beat cancer.

In 2021, I found out that I was pregnant. I savored every moment of those nine months of carrying our child, constantly marveling at the goodness of God. We chose not to find out if we were having a boy or girl and it was the best surprise on March 19, 2022 when we welcomed our baby boy, Jackson. Our first year with him was filled with all of the wonder, joy, and laughter we had hoped for. The verse we chose for Jackson’s life was Psalm 40:3: He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him. Jackson’s life was a new song, and I couldn’t have written a more perfect ending if I tried. Nearly nine years had passed and we were fully embracing this sweet season of life raising our son while the memories of fighting cancer began to fade.

Then, one afternoon with our oneyear-old on my lap, cancer violently collided with the happy ending we thought we were living out as I reached up and felt a swollen lymph node in my neck. On November 14, 2023 I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. This is cancer that began in the breast and moved to other parts of the body and is also referred to as MBC, late stage, or stage IV. There was another level of devastation that came with this diagnosis; this form of breast cancer is treatable, but not curable. With my first diagnosis, there was a plan and a cure. This time, there was a plan, but no cure. The treatment plan for MBC has no end date; no timeline, no dates on the calendar to work towards, no last chemo, and no bells to ring. I will

be on treatment for the rest of my life, with the goal being to give me more time. How much time? When will this treatment stop working? How old will Jackson be? This remains one of the hardest things to wrestle with while living with MBC—the constant uncertainty, and knowing that the uncertainty does not center around “if”, but “when."

Most of us operate with an assumption that our lives stretch out before us in decades. We lightheartedly make comments about the future because we assume that we will be present for all that will happen down the road. When our son graduates, when our daughter gets married, or when we retire are brought up commonly, even nonchalantly, in conversation. With a stage IV cancer diagnosis, all of those years you saw stretching out in front of you are still there, but you see them without yourself in them. You become acutely aware of a life for everyone you love without you in it. Casual conversations, an invitation to a retirement party, or news of a teenager getting his driver’s license can send you spiraling into thoughts of things that you will miss.

This makes many people uncomfortable, but it is my reality. However, my reality is also that God promises to be with me every step of the way and He is faithful. He makes it possible for me to live in this constant tension, to sit in the uncertainty but not be consumed by fear. He provides for us now, and I trust that He will still provide in the years ahead.

Once I began my treatment drugs, there were months of waiting for scans to determine if the drugs were effective. One Thursday afternoon as I sat crying in the infusion center, my nurse approached me with a clipboard holding an application for the Rainbow Restoration Charity Golf Classic which benefits local mothers battling stage IV cancer. She told me that applications were due the following day, so I got busy writing my story. I was ecstatic when I received the call from Heather Mattingly letting me know that I had been selected as a beneficiary.

Today, I am still on my first line of treatment, and I continue to have scans to monitor its effectiveness. Our hope before each scan is that we won’t see any progression, which means more time. Although this new song looks nothing like we imagined, we trust that it does not have to have a happy ending to be beautiful. If we stay in today and continue trusting Christ, we will always have enough. When hope cannot be found in an outcome, a cure, or a happy ending, this becomes the gift worth cherishing—just one more day to be a wife, mom, daughter, sister, and friend.