Posted on by Wallis Landrum (Wally)

Bone Bank    June 10, 2024

The surgeon explained he would cut out the benign tumor in my arm, and screw in a replacement bone. I asked, “Where do you get the new bone?” “Oh, we have a bone bank with healthy tissue donations. Otherwise, we’d have to take it from a larger bone in you.” 

On the phone my aunt had so many questions about the bone in the bank. What’s the history of the person? Will you get some traits from him? How did his family decide to donate his bones when he died? Could it be a woman’s bone?

They started an IV don’t-care-drug and wheeled into the OR. My surgeon patted my shoulder and said, “Mr. Landrum, we’re about to do begin. I just have to go to the bank first.” “That’s ok doc,” I slurred back, “you don’t have to check on dad at the bank. He can afford this. His check’s good.” Since I didn’t remember any of it, after the successful surgery, the surgeon told my parents he went to his knees laughing so hard.

Three years later, when her 24 year old daughter was brain dead from a car wreck, my aunt’s family chose to donate all her organs to help others. Their painful decision didn’t just help make a surgery less painful, it saved several lives. Years later, she gave me a bumper sticker that reads: “Don’t take your organs to heaven; heaven knows we need them here.”

When have you received a gift from a stranger you couldn’t thank? How do you live a generous life of thankfulness? Who do you talk to about organ and tissue donation for yourself and your loved ones?

Posted on by Wallis Landrum (Wally)

Life Islands  June 7, 2024

On Sunday evening, as I went into my hospital room, my parents went out. It wasn’t personal; it was business. They had been invited to dinner with the CEO of M.D. Anderson Hospital. I was left alone to listen to “Godspell” on a cassette tape while my youth group was performing it live.

One nurse sensed my sadness. She sat with me as I told her about my friends, my church, and what I was missing that night. Back then, on a slow Sunday, a nurse had time to be present for over an hour. Back then, I was admitted on Sunday for a surgery on Wednesday. I was 18 and healthy, and I needed something to fill the two days of waiting besides feeling sorry for myself.

On Monday my weekend nurse invited me to her weekday floor. Her patients were teenagers with cancer whose immune systems were compromised by chemotherapy. They lived in “life islands” for 3 months in a germ-free environment. Only sterile food and items could be passed into a plastic bubble that surrounded a bed, a chair, and a table. If I entered their space, I could kill them; if I were a companion through the plastic, I could help to heal their isolation.

Except for a few scheduled tests, I had two days of being teenagers together — strangers in a strange land. I wasn’t another cancer patient, parent, sibling, doctor, or nurse — I was someone new to listen, laugh, share, and care. Centering on their needs dispelled my self-centeredness.

Away from my private prep-school, I was becoming a chaplain without credentials. I visited 8 kids one on one. Soon enough I would ask myself: “Was a preppie preparing for a calling?”

How have you answered the question, “What is mine to do?” When has focusing on another’s needs taken your mind off your own? How have past situations become preparations for your future?

Posted on by Wallis Landrum (Wally)

Mistaken Miracle June 5, 2024

As my parents and I left home, we were told the hole in my bone looked like cancer; my left arm would probably be amputated before we returned. MD Anderson in 1975 was gigantic even for Texas. One desk would take blood, X-rays across campus, questions in one room, more blood in another. We wondered how 3 days of disparate data could come together.

On D-day (diagnosis day) we toured the Johnson Space Center before our 3 pm appointment. We entered an auditorium of desks filled with 30 students in white coats. My X-rays lit a wall behind an examination table on a stage. Mom’s legs buckled and I helped her into a chair before she hit the floor.

I was invited onto the stage table. Each time I answered a question about a specific symptom, the doctor would nod at me, nod at the room, and 30 white coats would scribble. No severe pain during the day (notes); 2 am wake up with sore arm (notes); aspirin helped me sleep (notes); onset a month or more ago (notes). We 3 were asked to wait outside.

The brief silent wilderness of waiting, watching a hundred promenading strangers facing their own fears, seemed like hours. The auditorium we re-entered now contained only our two doctors. Finally we were told that it was a benign tumor called Osteoid Osteoma; they could cut it out next week. In the moment, the reality of bone surgery on me seemed more frightening than the unreality of cancer; that feeling was fleeting.

One of my parents’ friends told me it was a miracle. God had reached down from heaven and cured me of cancer by changing the tumor. At the time I didn’t say what I thought: “It was more of a mistake than a miracle — a premature diagnosis with insufficient experience.” Later I would wonder if God really reaches in to miraculously change reality for people. If God acts alone to rescue one person, then why does God withhold a miracle from another? Maybe we need better understandings of miracles and how God works with us in our lives.

How do you interpret the metaphor of miracle in the Bible and in your life? If God could, why wasn’t Jesus rescued from state sanctioned execution by the empire? When have you waited for God to change something in your life? Do you wonder if God is waiting for you? How have you been partners with God to bring healing and wholeness?

Posted on by Wallis Landrum (Wally) · 5 Comments

William Sloane Coffin

During my final year of seminary, as 1983 began, I heard a taped sermon that transformed my life—an all-too-rare occurrence.

The sermon by William Sloane Coffin at the Riverside Church in NYC begins with words I would never forget: “As almost all of you know, a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm, my son Alexander – who to his friends was a real day-brightener, and to his family ‘fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky’ – my twenty-four-year-old Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave.”

10 days after his son died in a wreck, the father preached this sermon to his church January 23, 1983. You can search the sermon online; you can download the audio through his archives site.

As a pastor and hospice chaplain for 35 years, Coffin’s words still ring true: “When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, ‘I just don’t understand the will of God.’ Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. ‘I’ll say you don’t, lady!’ I said.”

“For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths……. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”

Since 1983, I have imagined being in hot pursuit, swarming all over many funeral consolers. With all the best intentions to protect God or insulate pain, I have overheard each of my top twenty list of deadly things to say to a grieving person. 

When you put your personal grief into words, what do you think, write, or say? Which cultural comments have not been helpful to your grief work and journey? What expressions and actions have brought you transformative comfort? 

Posted on by Wallis Landrum (Wally) · 4 Comments

Reach to Recovery

During my first grade in 1963, my mother had a “breast cancer radical mastectomy” surgery.  I had only heard the word “breast” spoken at dinner, “cancer” spoken in a whisper, “radical” later in the 60’s, and “mastectomy” was a mystery.  All I knew was my mom went into the hospital for many days, and her mother moved in to care for dad and 3 children.

Fortunately, the library volunteer at Chenoweth Elementary was a friend of mom’s so she could tell her this story I wouldn’t have remembered: “Wallis came into the library crying, ‘I don’t have my library book.  I don’t have the fine for my library book.  I don’t have my lunch money.  My mom’s in the hospital, my grandmother is taking care of us, and she just can’t cope!’”  Mom adored telling the “she just can’t cope” story the rest of her life.

I now know I was wrong; we did cope.  Everyone learned to cope with a radical removal in life.  Mom would initiate and lead the American Cancer Society’s “Reach to Recovery” chapter in Louisville.  Many days of my childhood mom would answer a phone call from a new breast cancer patient and I would hear her give information about diagnosis and treatment, shared grief from one who had also had surgery, donations of breast inserts for dresses and swimsuits, hope for the future, and telling the other woman she was not alone.  Mom would fully live another thirty-five years before dying of an unrelated cancer.

“Reach to Recovery” is just one example of survivors offering understanding, support and hope to others out of their own painful experiences.  In 1979 when I first read Henri Nouwen’s book “The Wounded Healer: In Our Own Woundedness We Can Become a Source of Life for Others”, I thought of mom turning her loss into a ministry.  I have been inspired by others who from their own life and faith experiences help others facing a similar addiction, crisis, illness, loss, or faith struggle.

How are you coping with the radical changes around us now?  Are you complaining, rebelling, surviving, isolated, smothered, or something else?  How does learning to cope in the past give you strength today?  How can you use your experience to help another person reach to their recovery?