ICHP & Isaiah

IPHC & Isaiah

(Intra-Perioneal Hyperthermic Chemotherapy)

"Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hands, which he had taken with tongs from off the altar..." Isaiah 6:6

by Linda Hoffman Kimball

Cancer clamped

crusty and gelatinous

in my husband’s gut

- his vitals and bowels.

With slow, relentless onslaught

(a dozen years of dumb, deadly work)

it filled every vacant space;

gripped every surface;

gooey sludge

crushing, stressing,

pressuring,

suffocating him

from the inside out.

A scan,

looking for something mundane,

Spotted the scourge.

Quick as we could say

“Oncologist”

We were

Catapulted

Down the dark hall,

Into the no,

No, no, no,

No.

Our/His only hope:

Stretched in cruciform,

Deliberately split, slit

Sternum to stem,

Scooped, scraped,

Redundant entrails

And the shimmering

Destroyer

in steel bowls.

Then Isaiah’s hot coal:

poured,

Swathed, sloshed, scoured

into the raw vacuum,

“Lo, this hath touched thee;

and thine iniquity is taken away,

and thy sin purged.”

And will we yet have this second,

Greater cure?

And I cried with you, and we said,

“Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts:

the whole earth is full of his glory.”

I spent several hours this morning in the LDS temple whispering in white, calling down the powers of Heaven to cleanse and prepare women for the bounty God has eternally in store for them. It made me recall the stark surgery my husband endured
in May of 2007 to rid him of a rare abdominal cancer (PMP). Doctors called my husband’s case “ultimate” in complexity and severity. The surgery involved removing every trace of cancer from his gut, removing all damaged or strangled organs, then bathing his raw interior with heated poison (chemo) to kill any outlier cancer cells too small to detect. The surgery and heated chemo treatment took 17 hours total.

We’re at 2 ½ years post surgery and he continues to be cancer free. In my reveries at the temple with its holy susurrations I felt reminded of what I need - a kind of cleansing by the deepest Healer, a cleansing even more thorough and ultimate than Chris endured.