A Way in the Wilderness: The Journey That Does Not End (Part 3 of 4)

Editor’s note: This is the third installment in A Way in the Wilderness, a four-part series following Laurens County resident JoDee Watkins through her breast cancer journey, told in her own words and with her blessing. Part 1 traced the diagnosis that arrived four days before Christmas. Part 2 followed the decision Watkins reached in the weeks that followed and the moment she told her children. Readers just joining can catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 on the Buzz website. Part 3 begins on the morning of her surgery.

The morning of her surgery, JoDee Watkins was surrounded by the people she loved.

Her parents, her sister, her husband, Jonathan, and her closest friends gathered at the hospital Feb. 24. Her best friend, Jessica, had told her days earlier that she could not bear to see her beforehand but promised to be in the room when she woke. Watkins came out of surgery in severe pain and in tears, and cried each time someone she loved walked in.

The bilateral mastectomy with aesthetic flat closure, she believed, meant the cancer was gone and that no radiation or chemotherapy would be needed. She kept telling herself that by April 1, everything would be healed and back to normal.

Three days later, that hope was tested. A MyChart notification told her that while the sentinel node removed during surgery was clear, another node was not. The cancer had reached her lymph nodes.

“It’s in my lymph nodes,” she told Jessica, who was cleaning the kitchen at the time.

The news, she said, taught her something she has carried since. The journey does not end.

“What I’ve learned now is it never will be,” Watkins wrote. “I can imagine even in remission you carry it with you.”

Her friend Grace arrived from Nashville to care for her, the same friend who had been with her 28 years earlier on the day Watkins learned her mother had died in a house fire. As Grace put her home back in order, Watkins said, she began the slow work of putting her broken spirit back together, leaning on a line from a devotional she read in the days after surgery: when she could not feel assured in her faith, she would choose to follow anyway.

In the months since, Watkins has learned her Oncotype results meant five weeks of radiation, five days a week, but no chemotherapy. She has told AnneDee, who sobbed and then asked whether her mother would lose her hair. She has watched her family grow closer, and she has reached for the phone to call friends far more than she once did.

She had hoped to tell her story in seven posts and be done. Seven, she noted, is the number of completion. But she has come to accept that her story is not finished, and that sharing it may be part of the point.

That, in the end, is why she chose to tell it now rather than wait for a month set aside on a calendar. Cancer had not waited for a convenient season, and neither, she decided, would her hope. Watkins, who lost her mother in a fire at 28 and her 19-year-old brother in a separate tragedy, said her prayer is not that everything will turn out fine, but that others walking a hard road might find a deeper hope.

“God is good,” she wrote. “God is good to me. God is good at being God.”

Part 4 offers practical guidance for those who receive a frightening diagnosis, and points to the Laurens County resources ready to walk the journey alongside them.