Home  My Testimony
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In Memory Of Thy Grace |
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 January 1996 - my husband called to say that he had arranged a medical appointment for me. I was to see the Head of the Ear, Nose and Throat Department of the Toa Payoh Hospital (now merged with another hospital to form the Changi General Hospital).
My nose had been bleeding every day for some months. To me, that was nothing more than what the Chinese would call “heatiness”. I was not alarmed but my husband did not want to take any chances and insisted that I see the doctor.
I was in for a shock.
The doctor examined me in detail and conducted several diagnostic tests. Her diagnosis was nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), or in layman’s terms, nose cancer. My husband looked completely stunned. I thank God that somehow we were both still quite composed and our first reaction was to entrust our lives into the hands of God. We however felt a deep sorrow that such a tragedy should strike us, especially when our children were still so young. We prayed silently that God would grant us the strength to be able to accept His will.
The next few weeks, I had to undergo more tests. The biopsy results on the tests and re-tests showed only ‘severe chronic inflammation’. It seemed like this was something to cheer about but the doctor was very certain about her diagnosis. She pointed out her basis - my blood test result was at the upper limit of 1:640 (where 1:40 is already a highly possible positive case of cancer).
She told me that she spoke to the pathologist personally and he too confessed that he was very tempted to indicate NPC but that the biopsy results prevented him from doing so. Such comments were not made once but several times as the tests were repeated.
A positive biopsy result is needed before cancer treatment may begin. My doctor was worried for me because she was very confident of her diagnosis – more than 90%, she said. She did not want to wait much longer for the ‘cancer’ to surface. She said that she would submit my case to the Medical Board meeting for special approval to begin radiotherapy.
This course of action sounded very frightening to me. I was reluctant to go ahead with the treatment because I felt that my case was very strange. Here, while the doctors seemed so sure of their diagnosis, yet they could not definitely confirm it. On one occasion when another doctor happened to be in my doctor’s room, she asked him to take a look at my nose and immediately upon seeing it, he commented, “I know what you mean”.
Yet, pending the Medical Board meeting, nothing could proceed without a positive biopsy result. We could only wait.
Unexpectedly in October 1996, I was shocked to hear that, while in Australia for a medical conference, my doctor passed away tragically in a car accident. She had promised to see me again after her one-week conference in Australia but I never saw her again. She was a caring doctor and the medical fraternity had lost a distinguished fellow. I missed her. Her sudden death, all the more, confirmed that my life indeed lies in the hands of God.
It was during this period that I was trying my hands on music arrangement for sacred music ministry. This was something very new to me and would have been very far-fetched based on my musical knowledge and ability. It started with casual, leisure arrangement but later I became more serious in it and arranged some hymns for the choir, the recorder group as well as some individual presentations.
When I first learnt of my suspected NPC, I had wanted to abandon this budding aspiration as I was only working on my first arrangement piece then. The turning point in realizing that I could still do it despite whatever that might befall me was after I had my ear-drums punctured to drain out the fluid in them. The tiny hole was supposed to be self-healing and this would normally take about three days. However, one of my ears just did not seem to heal, even after some weeks. I was beginning to worry and the doctor told me sadly that in some cases, the hole would remain permanently and the patient would just have to live with it. This was heartbreaking news to me.
One afternoon, in my daily prayer, I earnestly prayed to the Lord to help me. I told Him that the tiny hole is nothing to the Creator, yet to me, His little created being, it was very disturbing and unbearable. I begged for His mercy as I told Him that hearing is very important to me in the area of music while acknowledging that He is not ignorant of this. After the prayer, as I was entering the bathroom to wash my face, a miraculous thought and realization just dawned on me that the hole in my ear had been cured. Immediately I believed the hole had healed. This was confirmed by my doctor. Praise the Lord!
The weekly medical appointments for the suspected NPC turned monthly and then yearly. I was then discharged in 1999. However my throat continued with the chronic irritation and the occasional nose and throat bleeding. In 2005, I visited another ENT Professor. He performed another biopsy and thank God it remained negative. Refusing to discharge me, he maintains a six monthly review and monitoring as the blood tests remains consistently suspicious of NPC. I take each review at a time and live by the grace of our Lord Jesus.
I pray and hope that these simple arrangements though amateurish, will not only bring grateful memories of His Grace to me but the same consolation and strength to you in your own times of trials and tribulations.
“In Memory of Thy Grace” is dedicated to the glory of the name of Jesus. Amen!
Mary Tay
January 2008
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