Michelle's Story: The Sound of Courage
Michelle Middleton and I have never met beyond the posts of Facebook where we both are part of an invite-only support community for breast cancer survivors. In this series on courage I have written about Alan, a three time cancer survivor and 2014 Hero of Hope, and Jon and Pedro who drove through a dangerous section of Mozambique to get Pedro home to name his new son, and Rogers who chose courage instead of surrender with his diagnosis of HIV/AIDS. Michelle felt her story seemed irrelevant in comparison, but courage is also found in the every day, in the small adventures, in the holding-on in the difficult and the releasing control in the hard. Courage is found in white water when you take your difficult to the river.
Michelle's Story: The Sound of Courage
Lub. Dub. Lub. Dub.
Michelle Middleton’s heart beat slowly as she relaxed in her tent, the morning sun not yet lighting the nylon interior.
Lub. Dub. Lub. Dub.
She lay there, listening to the camp waking up, and with her heartbeat, almost in rhythm, she heard the sound of the river.
Lub. Dub. Lub. Dub.
A dozen feet away the Salmon River flowed, the longest unbroken piece of water in the lower 48, stretching 425 miles through pristine wilderness, flowing like the blood in her heart in one continual direction.
While her heart had valves monitoring the flow, the Salmon had curves, bends and rocks--but no dams--as the water rolled down the canyon—in the spring, in a life-threatening torrent, but now in mid-summer, a dancing child at play.
She had prayed for seven months for a chance to go on a six-night rafting trip for cancer survivors, funded by private donations through River Discovery. Ten days before the scheduled departure there was a cancellation and she found herself among eighteen other survivors, six guides, two nurses and one counselor on the banks of the Salmon, her heart beating in time with the river.
Needing to use a cane and struggling with neuropathy in both her hands and feet – a side effect from chemo - she needed help from the other participants to break camp. After breakfast they loaded onto rafts, a paddleboat, and inflatable kayaks and headed out for a day on the river, the sun climbing higher on the canyon walls.
A canyon wren whistled a cascading warble for the new day as the group pushed off from shore and settled into a flat stretch, keeping a close eye for sightings of big horn sheep, black bear, elk, bald and golden eagles and the great blue heron.
The paddling was not difficult, which surprised Michelle with her numb hands. “The Lord provides,” she said in wonder, and kept stroking
.Off in the distance she heard a low rumble. Her eyes caught the faint splash of white foam on the horizontal line.
Rapids! Class III.
Lub-dub-lub-dub-lub-dub.
Her heartbeat picked up tempo as the speed of the water increased.
“Too dangerous,” people told her when she was packing to leave on the trip. She laughed. Too dangerous has a different meaning when you’ve been diagnosed with Stage 4 TNBC Mets – Stage 4 triple negative breast cancer that has spread to her sternum, lungs, and liver.
She dug her paddle into the foaming water as the raft rose and fell in the torrent as she gloriously and beautifully checked off an item on her bucket list, her heart racing in the adrenaline-charged whitewater.
Lub-dub-lub-dub-lub-dub-lub-dub.
“People say I have a lot of courage,” Michelle says, “but I really have no choice. I just keep going. Keep trusting and living for today. That is all the courage I have.”
Once again on a flat section of crystal-clear water, her heart slowed to a regular rhythm, the blood pushing through the valves in synchronized time, like a metronome.
“Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who hope in the LORD,” the psalmist says in Psalm 31:24.
Michelle would agree. “In difficult circumstances, always trust in Him.”
Trust. Not just a five-letter word. Not something spoken glibly, but born through difficult seasons, like the river in spring break-up, ripping trees from their moorings.
In 1987, at age 20, Michelle was diagnosed with ALL (Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia). Her heart was damaged in a rare side effect from the chemo and in 2002 she had a heart transplant. In May 2011 she was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer and had a double mastectomy. In May 2012 the cancer progressed to stage 4.
Lub. Dub. Lub. Dub.
Her borrowed heart beats on the white sand beach where new friends help her set up her tent for another night on the river. Two years of chemo this time around has not damaged her transplanted heart, a fact, for which, Michelle is thankful.
Borrowed heart. Borrowed time. A rhythm of trust learned in adversity.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
The noise reverberates in her chest—the sound of courage.