Part One

Chapter 1

Something on Your Liver

December

It was 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, December 1, 2002. His dark hair tousled, my slender husband, Scott, nudged me awake, saying, “Let’s go to the emergency room. I want them to give me something to take away this pain.” I looked up at him. His handsome features were scrunched up with some agony that had been hurting terribly for the past few days. Last night he’d tossed in bed all night. Now, preparing to get up, he sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the heel of his right hand against his right rib cage, attempting to push back that hurt. Later I remembered often seeing this action, long before December.

My fifty-one-year-old husband was concerned about the pain because of a blood clotting condition he’d just discovered he had. On a recent long trip to Australia, he had developed a large blood clot and had found that it was due to a hereditary disorder called factor V Leiden. Factor V is a mutation of one of the clotting factors in the blood that can increase the chance of developing abnormal blood clots. It can even cause death.

Hospital personnel were not so ready to dispense either a blood thinner or pain medication. “We need to find out what this is before we prescribe something for you,” they said. They sent him to have a chest angiography (to check the blood vessels in the chest) and then a CT scan (to check cross-sections of bones as well as soft tissues). Both procedures were more detailed than X-rays.

After a while, the doctor on call came back. Folding his hands behind him, he said, “Well, there’s good news and bad news. The pain is not caused by a blood clot.”

Scott tangibly relaxed over this good news and smiled thinly.

The doctor went on: “But there’s something on your liver that shouldn’t be there.”

I caught my breath, and Scott unconsciously leaned backward, our world suddenly collapsed to a small, white-sheeted cubicle. Wasn’t the emergency room doctor supposed to wait for the primary care physician or someone else to tell us something unexpected like this? Wasn’t there some way to prepare us? This was not at all why we thought we’d come. What could it be?

Thus started our four-month quest for a cure for the “something” on his liver. Early on, during a phone conversation with my daughter-in-law, Lindsey, two phrases popped unbidden into my mind with a sort of flicker that felt like a déjà vu:

“Scott will make a choice; once chosen, it will be irrevocable.”

Throughout my life, words or ideas occasionally appear in my mind that I know are not of my own making; they don’t emanate from my brain. The earliest one I recall was the day of my first singing contest when I was seventeen years old. My first thought of the morning came with absolute clarity: I would win the contest. The notion made me neither arrogant nor flippant; it just made me glad. I went about my day happily knowing that I would win and was delighted, but not surprised, when I did. Who knows? Maybe it was that very idea that someone in Heaven dropped into my head that made me sing in such a way that I did win the contest.

These particular phrases about Scott came from that same heavenly source and stood out with such clarity that I wrote my short experience of receiving them in my journal. Thereafter, I treated them as a portent, paying close attention to see what choices Scott would make, but I never told anyone those two phrases. I figured the words meant that Scott would make a choice of treatment, and the treatment would lead toward a certain path, presumably with a healthy outcome. Those words from God’s Spirit, in addition to what Scott asked of me, helped to define our different roles in this venture: mine was to research choices of treatment; his was to choose and, hopefully in the choosing, to get better!

* * *

The “something” was a big something—nine centimeters by four centimeters, or roughly four and a half inches by two inches. The doctors undoubtedly had a frame of reference for this, but we did not. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t just big; it was huge! I would not gain a perspective of its enormity until three months later.

Something that big would surely be a tumor, but not a single doctor could or would say if it was cancer. I suspect every one of them thought it was cancer, but in our politically correct world, and with the inherent careful nature of doctors, they didn’t say a thing. They did begin a battery of tests that lasted throughout December—MRIs, CT scans, more CT scans, chest X-rays, cytopathology, antibody pathology, and single specimen pathology. They didn’t find anything conclusive.

Late in the month, Scott had an aspiration, or a needle biopsy. This procedure hurt more than any of the others. The doctor inserted a long, large needle through the skin, between the ribs, and into the nine centimeter by four centimeter mass. He was hoping to score a hit and draw out tissue from the mass that would inform him as to its composition. Now, imagine spreading your hand wide open and poking a stick at it, but blindfolded. You’re hoping to hit a finger with your stick, but you have just as much chance of hitting air. In Scott’s case, the procedure hit empty space and didn’t provide much information at all. The doctors considered doing it again, but Scott answered an emphatic “No!” It had hurt like crazy!

The pathologist and doctor thought that, according to the cancer markers from the extracted tissue, it might be a melanoma. Our family physician then thoroughly checked Scott for skin cancer. He removed a couple of suspicious moles and sent them to pathology, but none was cancerous. The doctor then said maybe it was an internal melanoma. What? We’d never heard of that. We could visualize treating an external skin cancer, but how do you combat a melanoma that you can’t see?

After some of these tests, Scott called his mother, Mom B, in California to tell her that the doctor had found something on his liver. Because the doctors weren’t saying much, he didn’t have a lot to tell her. Nevertheless, she heard a tone in his voice that she had never heard before. His petite blond mother hopped on a plane the next day and came to Provo, Utah, to be with us.

“Mom, why did you do that?” he asked, but he felt so much better having her here. I was surprised she was so intuitive but pleased that she would come to support Scott. In addition, she had read the same natural healing material that we had, so that gave us an additional voice of information.

Of course, we told our children that Dad had a problem and that the doctors were trying to figure it out. The oldest two and their spouses—Sara and Allen, Ben and Lindsey—became as involved as they could be, asking often about the latest information, and generally cheering him on. Seventeen-year-old Katie handled it by staying busy at the high school, and Jacob, in California, was torn, wishing he could be in two places at once. But his wife, Jenise, was pregnant with their second baby, so he was exactly where he needed to be. The twenty-year-old twins, however, were on LDS missions at a facility just down the road, learning the Gospel of Christ in Romanian and Hungarian.1 Their task was overwhelming enough, so I kept the emailed letters to them cheery but vague. After all, the doctors hadn’t found anything definitive yet, so I didn’t want to worry them.

At home, Scott immediately began making a binder to add to other health binders he’d created. By his own nature and from his training as a chemical engineer, Scott was careful, logical, and methodical. His folders already included:

• Heart problems: His grandma had a heart attack at sixty but survived and lived to age ninety-seven. His father had a heart attack at fifty-four that killed him by fifty-five.
• BYU comprehensive wellness program: My five-foot-eleven husband was in excellent shape at 155 pounds with about 5 percent body fat. He skied in the winter, played racquetball the rest of the year, and biked to work daily—even in the snow. He was a four-time champion of faculty tournaments at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he’d been an assistant professor in chemical engineering and now was an engineering consultant. (He played/trained with the college guys, and since their racquetball team was number one in the nation, it said a lot that he could keep up with them!)
• Prostate: His PSA was 3.0, well under the goal of 6.0.
• Stomach cramps: He had cramps about every other year—so severely that he would just lie on the cold bathroom floor for an hour.
• Poison oak: He and our oldest son didn’t realize that poison oak grew on our vacant lot. The Weedwacked fluid sprayed everywhere, it became a huge problem in their bodies that year, and the problem even resurfaced the next year!
• Colonoscopy: He’d had this procedure done two months earlier and was fine.
• Thrombosis and factor V Leiden: This disorder afflicts 5 percent of the population and causes blood to clot too quickly. So that’s why he never bruised when a 140-mile-per-hour racquetball hit him!
• He labeled the new binder “Liver.”

* * *

The liver is an amazing organ! It performs more than five hundred functions daily, most of them vital. What a friend! It manufactures amino acids—the building blocks of proteins; it...