Episode S7E5: Foxhole Buddies

Listen to Vicki Habecker and Karen Brosseau talk about their ‘momma hearts’ during the difficult journey God has led them on as adult sons face critical medical problems.

Transcript

Narrator: 0:00

Ian today on the finishing well podcast,

Unknown: 0:06

I mean, it broke me. It broke it broke my heart. You know, you just, you just a mother's heart. Mother's heart does not want to hear that her child has cancer. Even if they're 43 years old, they

Narrator: 0:16

just don't welcome to the finishing well podcast, where we encourage believers of every age to find meaningful ways to impact their world for the kingdom of God. Our mission is to prepare and encourage every person to live well and to finish well. We pray this podcast will be a source of strength and encouragement as we seek to glorify Christ as we engage him in our aging years. Now here's your host for finishing well. Hal habecker,

Hal Habecker: 0:43

welcome to the finishing well ministry podcast. I have the special honor of introducing my wife, Vicki. Say hi, Vicki, hey listeners. She's here, and she's going to lead our podcast today with a good friend and Vicki take it over. Introduce Karen, and have a great ministry today.

Vicki Habecker: 1:02

Thank you. Well, I'm introducing my good friend for how many years did you say 100 at least? Karen Brasso, we're calling this podcast foxhole buddies. It's about mamas and adult sons. We've been friends forever. Raised kids together. We had three, you had three, and then you kept going, how many? How many?

Unknown: 1:27

All together? Six, yeah, five boys, five boys and one girl.

Vicki Habecker: 1:32

Now all of our kids are adults, and one of yours and one of mine have some serious medical challenges, and you, as a retired medical professional, you were a nurse for how many years?

Unknown: 1:47

I'm still a nurse. You're still, I still practice one day a week, and

Vicki Habecker: 1:51

I was physical therapist for 40 years, and we know too much, maybe, yeah, gets us in trouble. It does get us in a lot of trouble. So you learned how many months ago that your son, Danny, September and September and he was diagnosed with

Unknown: 2:10

stage three or four colon cancer.

Vicki Habecker: 2:13

What was your initial reaction?

Unknown: 2:18

Well, it really wasn't shock, because he had been struggling with severe anemia for a while and having blood iron transfusions, and I'd been trying to get him to go get a colonoscopy, because when your blood counts drop and you naturally assume they're bleeding somewhere, and he was convinced that his doctor said that he did not need to Have a colonoscopy because he had had a gastric bypass 20 something years ago, and that that was part of the process. They had trouble with iron and anemia, so he didn't need to have one. And finally, when he moved over to Southwestern, they said, You need to have a colonoscopy. And when they did the colonoscopy, they said, why did you wait so long on having the colonoscopy, because it was a tumor that had been there very long time.

Vicki Habecker: 3:04

How did you react? How did your husband react? And how did Danny react?

Unknown: 3:11

Well, when they told Danny, when he woke up, they he started crying. He goes, I don't want to die, and I feel and I both cried and and he started making calls. And I wasn't angry, actually, I wasn't even that shocked, because I knew something was terribly wrong, and I had a gut sense it was something really bad that, I mean, it broke me. It broke it broke my heart. You know, you just, you just a mother's heart. Mother's heart does not want to hear that her child has cancer, even if they're 43 years old, they just don't.

Vicki Habecker: 3:44

And Jonathan's wasn't cancer, but it was end stage liver disease. And I sat there in the hospital that first day and heard that he had three months to live.

Unknown: 3:54

That's unfathomable. It really is.

Vicki Habecker: 3:59

There's a shock value, I think, in all of this at first. And one of the reasons I thought about this foxhole Buddies is there was a war going on surrounding Danny and his health, and there was a war going on around Jonathan and his health. And sometimes I just needed to hide, well, jump in a safe place, and I knew you were going through it. And I mean, we've been friends forever. We've gone to Israel together. We, you know, been to ball games together, church together, but there was something different this time.

Unknown: 4:32

Yeah, no, you're both struggling with the same tracks of a fellow struggler. You know, when you're in a foxhole. I can't imagine, but I've read so many and seen movies, and you know, you just feel like you don't necessarily feel like you're in a safe place. It feels like everything's coming at you, or it did to me, so many people trying to help, so many doctors, so many opinions, and you feel like you're overwhelmed, and all you can do is say, Lord, help me. Take the next step, the next minute to the next minute, and you can't sleep. You can't sleep in a phone. So for somebody who's always struggled with sleep, it just ended. It's just a horrible feeling. It really is.

Vicki Habecker: 5:12

Did you find yourself begging for Danny's life? I did. Oh yeah. I would come home from the hospital. Tried to be brave when we were at the hospital, but then I would come home and totally fall apart. And my only I remember, I don't know what it was about the dresser in our bedroom, but I remember coming in, grabbing the edge of it with my hands, and just saying, please. That was my prayer, please. And then I finally could say, Please don't take my son. I didn't bargain with God, no. It was just please, I know he's yours.

Unknown: 5:50

I know he's yours. You created every cell in his body, and you've allowed this, and I don't get it, but please change the bad cells into good cells, make him healthy again, and give him a heart for you again. I mean, not that he ever left, necessarily, but Danny had developed a shell around his whole body. It like he wasn't warmed us. He wasn't warmed it really as friends, he just had withdrawn for a lot of reasons that felt like even when he came over to our house, when he came over for family dinners, he would either leave the table and go sit on the couch, and then when everybody would come in there, he could not

Vicki Habecker: 6:32

go home. I remember you said he never felt love or felt he knew less than

Unknown: 6:38

yes, what he should be. He was the middle child, and he represented it so well, but he was angry. He felt like angry, and, you know, and Diana told me that he his wife, that he just didn't, he didn't feel loved. And I'm like, I felt like we tried harder with Danny than anybody, but he, he just, he had weight issues, and he had learning disabilities, and, you know, but he just didn't feel our love. And then when this happened, and within 12 hours of getting the diagnosis, and his oldest brother from Carolina walked in unexpectedly, and he just burst into tears. And then an hour later, the brother from California walks in, and he burst into tears, and he just kept saying, and then the next day, Boone comes in from Austin, and he just says, I just feel so loved. And his friends overwhelmed him with love, and he realized I'm not only loved, I'm very loved.

Vicki Habecker: 7:29

I asked Jonathan, because he had a lot of his high school and college fraternity brothers show up at the hospital, and he said it was great to see him, he said, but I knew why they were there. They thought I was dying. Yeah, okay. Danny, as a wife and kids, Jonathan, single, did you have to as a mother and a mother in law? Did you have to ask permission to get involved? Or were they willing to let you get involved? You know, Jonathan single, and he was so ill, he didn't have a choice. He had to move. He had lost his car, he lost his job. He had to move in with us, and between Bethany as a nurse and me as a retired medical person, he had to listen to us. But how was that different? Since Danny was married.

Unknown: 8:23

I feel like looking back on it that Diana was stunned for the first couple of weeks that she was in, maybe in the originally a little bit of denial, but just they absolutely, very willingly, not only looked to me for direction, but she they very much asked me every single question, you know, because Philip and Ben wanted Danny to transfer now to MD Anderson, and they wanted they did, get him in an ambulance and move him over to Baylor. He had been Presby, and they put him in an ambulance and said, We're going to Baylor. And they did. And they looked at me and said, is that okay? And I said, Absolutely, you know. But they were like, can we push harder for MD Anderson? And I was like, you know, he's got three little girls here. You know, we can't put his anyway. I wanted him to live. I wanted the best care for him, but I didn't necessarily 100% support. Let's move him to Houston and but they he looked for me for everything. Can I let him start this IV? Do I take this pain medicine? Helped me get through this colonoscopy prep, all of it. It was mom help. Well, looking at me.

Vicki Habecker: 9:31

How was their marriage? You said she was kind of in shock or denial at first, as the weeks and months have since progressed. Are they a complete team?

Unknown: 9:42

They are now, when he was even in the hospital, I mean, I had Be careful not to overstep, but he was not being nice to her. He was, you know, and when, usually the people who love the most are often the ones you're going to take things out on. And he he was being rough on her. And I had to say, I. Had to I left one time. I was so mad at him, and then he said, Mom, Diana thinks I'm being mean to her. And I said, Oh, you are being mean to her. And I told her, do not put up with this, because Danny can get real irritable when he doesn't feel good. And I said, Danny, you don't have the right to treat your family this way. They're going through this too. She's struggling, and they are. They're so much better now. And he is very much aware, and he's told me a few times, I haven't been nice today, but we got on our knees this morning and asked, I'm praying God to help me to be kinder.

Vicki Habecker: 10:34

I want to say something to our listeners right now, as Karen and I were talking about doing this podcast, it may seem that we're throwing some people under the bus, and we have no intention of doing that. We're just making observations about a real difficult journey that her son and family has gone through, and my son and family has gone through. So please don't take any of this as we are angry or we're critical or we're condemning people, because we all react differently.

Unknown: 11:10

It's and there's no perfect way to it.

Vicki Habecker: 11:12

Well now, how did your and Phil's marriage? How is it effective? Because Hal and I got real snarky with each other because I was grieving a certain way, he was grieving a certain way, and we were on this same page in terms of asking God to heal but, but I just, some days I just didn't like my husband, and he didn't like me.

Unknown: 11:35

Phil and I were not being snarky. Phil was, I would say, more like Diana and that he was in a fog, I guess, from working in the emergency room, you know, and when a crisis hits for me, I get into mode of move. I'm in it. I'm fixing, I'm going, I was not dealing with other stuff. I was on for Danny and Phil was kind of, you know, keeping life as it was. And, you know, one day he said, Why do you look so sad? I mean, it was like the second day after we found out he had cancer. And I said, Well, my son has cancer, and then, like, the next morning, we're making the bed. And he goes, Did you sleep? Okay? And I said, about an hour. And he goes, why? And I said, Well, they're putting a port in for Danny, which means I have to accept the fact that he's got cancer, you know, and he's like, oh, you know, it just hadn't, I guess, fully registered. And I wasn't angry with him, because he does respond differently than me, but it was tough because I didn't feel like I could go and just fall into his arms and just fall apart because he would, you know, it was just different.

Vicki Habecker: 12:45

Are you enjoying Danny more than you used to? Because, of course, Jonathan's living with us.

Unknown: 12:53

The different enjoyment.

Vicki Habecker: 12:56

That's another podcast, but we have a different relationship now, and it's not just because he's living with us, but because he was facing death. Yeah, he was given three months to live at the very beginning, and you just put trivial Joke aside.

Unknown: 13:16

And Danny knows and has seen how fully I love him now, and he calls me all the time. He says, Mom, come by. I want to visit. He stays and talks to us. It's, you know, I've heard people say, if you had it to do over, would you, would you even want to have cancer again? And they say, I would. It changed me that much, and it's changed Danny that much. He's so much more in tune with the Lord, and he's he's he's sweet and he's sensitive and he's grateful. And, I mean, it's a much happier relationship, sweeter relationship.

Vicki Habecker: 13:52

Jonathan is funny. Now, Danny was always funny. Danny was funny and Jonathan was but compass, but he and I just get real sarcastic with you with each other now. Now, I don't know if any of you listeners are going through, or have gone through anything with an adult child with a serious medical issue, but I hope you relate to some of this stuff that we've said, that whole idea of brokenness, it's an ugly picture. But what has God taught you through this journey watching your son? It's easy for me to say, What has God taught Jonathan? Because, I mean, he is so on fire for Jesus. He talks about him. He goes to AA five times a week. He has spoken at AA. He's done a podcast on here. He's not afraid to share his story in hopes of it helping somebody else. So Jonathan's a different he's a different man, yeah. So it's easy for you to say that. Danny's a different man. But how are you different as a mom, it's a

Unknown: 15:05

different relationship with a son than a daughter. I have five sons, and you have to be a little more hands off and step back. You have to control your words and your when, even when they're screaming to come out. But God has taught me that a he'll he will be there. In the tiniest details, he's given Danny courage when I was just praying, give him the courage to get through this next step. And he's given me courage, and he's changed me into, I mean, I always believe God had my kids, but man, I seen it differently

Vicki Habecker: 15:40

if you're like me, because in a minute, I want you to tell the good news about Danny. But I always knew God could do miracles. Yeah, one of my grandsons should be there, not be here. And we saw a physical miracle that God did. And I'm seeing that now with Jonathan too. So it makes me realize my ideas of God doing a miracle are completely different.

Unknown: 16:09

Yeah, they are different. They're very different.

Vicki Habecker: 16:12

And you still always hold on to that. And you know what? If God takes one of us home tomorrow, one of our kids blow the trumpet, please. Let's have this crazy world. But I now know my son is totally ready.

Unknown: 16:27

Yeah, ain't gonna be okay without you. No, I don't know. I don't know either. I mean, they can't live without us, can they? But, you know, we always like to think that, but he is dependent on me, not an unhealthy way. Now, I mean, he, he and Diane are doing well, and they're very much a team. And the only conflict we really had was the night he was going to that he had surgery, which was a very long surgery, and she, she was going to stay. And I had been always staying at the nights with him, and Danny called to tell me. And I said, Well, I'm staying too. And he just sat there. And I said, Danny, you have three little girls at home. She can't stay all day at the surgery, spend the whole night in the hospital and then go take those three little girls. And neither can I, you know, I can go home and rest after being there all night. And that was the first time she had to, I had to step up and say, good boy, she can stay, but I am a two. And I did, because he needed a nurse that night. He needed a nurse that night, you know. But after that, I I learned to very carefully say, are you taking into chemo, or am i Because, you know, in the beginning, it was me,

Vicki Habecker: 17:39

Helen, I we still do it, especially since Jonathan's still living with us on Sunday afternoons or Sunday evenings, we have what we call our come to Jesus meeting. We sit down the three of us and we talk about the past week. We talk about appointments or doctor appointments or whatever is coming up the approaching week. But then we also say, What am I doing to make you crazy? Yeah, that's a good thing. We aren't doing that. And he would say, Do you really want to know? Yeah, yeah. We do some of it kind of hurt, but it helped us know, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that Ephesians verse that I shared with you, let no one wholesome word receive from my mouth, except which is good for criticism. No, I think the Bible says edification. But here's the singer according to the need of the moment. Well, sometimes I think the moment is right now and I need pontificate, yeah, so I've learned that doesn't work.

Unknown: 18:48

Yeah, no, didn't work. We've had some come to Jesus meetings, but more of them were in the hospital when he was very fearful of this, everything medical. He didn't even want to know about his disease. And he would say, I don't want to hear it. And I would be like, I finally just said, Listen, we need to talk. This is your disease, and you need to learn everything you can about it and how to fight it, you know. And it's not for me to tell you what to do. It's for you to learn some of this. And he's like, Okay. And then we would, you know, have something else, and I would say, you need to know that you can't treat your wife like that even when you're sick, you know, how did they tell the children? Oh, well, they kind of didn't. They just told him he was sick because he we took him to the emergency room, and she had to get somebody to stay there with him. And so they have, what, three little girls, three little girls, and six, eight and nine or 10. And they knew he had not been feeling well for the weeks before, but they didn't have any idea, so they kind of didn't tell him. And they had just started at Trinity. And of course, they have all the prayer team. And everybody and people kept coming up to Him, praying for your dad, praying for your dad. So the girls were kind of upset that they were like, realizing things were serious. And finally, Annabelle came home and said, Daddy, do you have cancer? And what is that? And they had to tell them more than they had told them before.

Vicki Habecker: 20:16

Yeah, what was the verse that you were sharing with me about? And I brought one home from Israel, a tear bottle. Yeah, tell me about your tear bottle. What are your thoughts on that?

Unknown: 20:27

One of my favorite verses is Psalms. 56, eight. You know that you have counted all my tears and put them in a bottle? One version says you you've seen my wanderings, but I just like the thought of God counting all my tears, and that none of them are wasted.

Vicki Habecker: 20:43

And some days it wasn't a bottle, it was a bucket. It was a

Unknown: 20:47

bucket, kind of like the oil that never quit coming in the Bible. You know, he never lets it fill up so much you can't put more

Vicki Habecker: 20:53

in that same psalm, 56 I love verse three when I'm afraid. And you know, that's when you jump in a foxhole. That's when you jump in the foxhole. But it says when I'm afraid, I will What put my trust in you. And I think that's one of the things that as we get older, we've seen a lot still are, I think I'm learning to trust more than I did when I was 40.

Unknown: 21:23

Yeah, but we're so not promised it to be easy. And you know the concept of getting old and it being an easy, relaxed life. I mean, we have friends sick or dying and kids struggling, and no one really that's been really sick. But, you know, it's just amazing how much your faith is strengthened because of all he's allowed you to survive in

Vicki Habecker: 21:48

my prayer time, because I don't sleep either. So my biggest prayer time is maybe 3am in the morning. But Karen, lately, it's all these people, whether they're 30 with pancreatic cancer, or 75 dying with some form of cancer. There's so many people to pray for that. And my prayer is, of course, God, if it's your will, please heal them, but that they would sense your presence in the journey.

Unknown: 22:23

Because everybody that goes through the even the ones that don't survive, you know, have such an impact on people's lives. They either see Jesus in them. They see Jesus in the way they handle it, the way they they die, if they die, or the way they are. They can't go past their fear. I mean, Danny has said so many times he goes, I have complete peace about this. You know that he, in the beginning, he was afraid. He was like, I don't want to die. And he told me, just the other day, just started back chemo this week after his surgery, and he was he said, I had a bad Sunday. He was always in such a bad mood, and I was so irritable, and he goes, but Diane and I both woke up with complete peace this morning, you know.

Vicki Habecker: 23:07

So I remember Jonathan, this was probably day three in the hospital, that he just was sitting, he was miserable, first of all, and he was scared, yeah, and he was sitting on the side of the bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and just weeping. And he told Hal, he said, I don't know how long I'm going to live with this, but I want to make every day count. That's huge. And he decided to start AA, and he's nine months of sobriety, he's never had a withdrawal. He's never had a craving. So Karen and I are sitting in my husband's office doing this podcast, and there's a painting on the wall of Christ, the back of Christ, and he's just walking through. Those of you that remember Mindy page. She did this beautiful painting years ago, but I told Karen, I said my idea of God's miraculous power is completely

Unknown: 24:18

different, because there's so many small things that other people might not even consider a miracle. And they are. They're just flat. I mean, the way Danny's brothers came to him without us telling him to, you know, and hovered around him and showed Danny so much love, and Danny, until he had his surgery, was, I mean, the tumor was huge. It was, it was well over the size of a softball, and his got his gallbladder was so infected, and he had a stone that was so big that they had to cut it, and have to even get it out and and he was just in terrible, terrible pain, and that was hard to watch, because they couldn't take the gallstone out until that he was ready for the full surgery. And. The full surgery couldn't be done until he had a certain amount of chemo to get to just shrink it some and get it separated, because it was they were afraid they wouldn't get it be able to get it out, because it was so enmeshed and entangled and inflamed.

Vicki Habecker: 25:13

So were they able to remove, they said, the gallbladder and the tumor.

Unknown: 25:17

They got it all. And so he is. He says, I'm not pain free. He started chemo back, and he's miserable. He says, nauseated and weak, but he's not in pain. And then he did have all those months of being on pain medicine, and then he had a hard time getting off of him, but he did. And praise God, that's a miracle, because, you know, he'd been on him a long time. That's a rough thing to do.

Vicki Habecker: 25:43

I remember Helen. I realizing that he and I were grieving differently, and like your family and all your friends, everybody wanted give me an update. I was at a point, at one point, where I thought if everybody would just leave me alone and let me get in the foxhole by myself, cover myself up with a blanket and not deal with what I knew we were going to deal with. And that's when hell and I got a little at each other, and I remember our beautiful daughter living in California. Of course, Bethany was here, and she was, yeah, she was in charge. She's the ER nurse, and she she walked us through some dark, ugly stuff, and got us in with the best and and told us what to do and what not to do, and when to do it and when to shut up. But Jennifer was on the West Coast, and bless her heart, she was so worried about not just Jonathan, but the whole scenario around she would call every hour, every two hours, and one day I said, Jennifer, you got to stop. Just give us a break. We're all grieving differently here. And she said, But mom, I'm grieving too, but I'm 1500 miles away, so I don't know about you, this hit us may 15. When did? When was

Unknown: 27:11

September 15? 16th? I'm exhausted. Yeah, it's a beating. It's a beating.

Vicki Habecker: 27:19

I'm exhausted, but grateful,

Unknown: 27:25

I tell you, just yesterday, Danny's oncologist called and his cancer markers had been very high. They show how much cancer is active in your body, and it's very colon cancer is one of the ones it's it's very receptive to and his were high, and they started coming down some when he was on his chemo, and they called yesterday and said it was it too, and he would be considered cancer free. And that's just beyond a miraculous call. Shout, oh my gosh. I was actually in a basketball game so I could shout. It's just it was, it's pretty amazing. I mean, he still has to finish the chemo, and, you know, you do run the risk of it coming back and all that. But it's, you know, God's just saying, Look, I got you exactly.

Vicki Habecker: 28:12

That's the way Jonathan's MELD score is. It's a measurement of end stage liver disease. When he was first diagnosed, it was at 30, it's now at eight, and six is normal. Now, will Danny and Jonathan ever have a normal colon and a normal liver again? I don't know. I don't know, but for right now, God has given y'all and given us hope,

Unknown: 28:41

good enough. That's good enough. Good enough for the next step, and that's what we got to take. You know, I just say, when you're in a foxhole, you just pray, God give me the next minute. Give me the next and he

Vicki Habecker: 28:55

does, and a buddy to go through, to go through it. So great. I saw the greatest thing. It was one of those ads on Facebook, of these pictures that you can order a tapestry, and it said, give it to God and go to bed. And I thought, I need that, not over my bed, but on the

Unknown: 29:14

ceiling, ceiling where my eyes are open. So would you

Vicki Habecker: 29:18

close us in prayer and just pray for all of our listeners who are going through, or have gone through something like this, for our sons and our families, Lord

Unknown: 29:31

God, I just can't even begin to express my gratitude to you. You are such an amazing and good God. You cover us so so closely. You don't miss a thing, and you created every cell in our children, and you can heal every cell. And sometimes it's a hard, hard walk. Lord, it's like, it's like the sheep when the Shepherd has to drive them through a ravine, and it's doesn't make sense that we'd have to go someplace. So dark and so steep, and yet that Shepherd knows on the other side of that hill there's green grass and there's green pastures, and that there's goodness, Lord and help us to know that you always have good things for us, even when it doesn't feel like it. And I pray that all the people that are also going through this, Lord are able to fall into your arms and trust you, Lord, because that's what you desire. You want more than anything, for us to trust you, be devoted to you and lean on you, because you are our good shepherd and you are our father and you're our friend and you're our healer. In your precious name, I pray.

Vicki Habecker: 30:38

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Karen, thank you.

Narrator: 30:43

You've been listening to the finishing well podcast. Let's keep pursuing Jesus together and encourage each other to follow him in our aging years. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or you can find us at finishing well ministries.org/podcast, our vision is to change the way we think about our aging Season of Life, equipping you to actively pursue God's calling in your life. May the Lord bless and encourage you and we'll see you next time on the finishing well. Podcast, you