Shining the Light of Faith on Healing Journey

By Lillie Shockney, Baltimore, Maryland

As appeared in

The call comes to me at my office several times a day. I can detect the fear in the caller’s voice. I know that fear.

She’s just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s found my name on the website for the Johns Hopkins Breast Center, where I’m the director, or she’s heard about us from one of our patients. Now she just needs to talk to someone.

She dreads treatment or surgery. She doesn’t know if she’ll survive. Her voice chokes up.

“I know how you’re feeling,” I eventually say. “I’ve had breast cancer myself. I was afraid too.”

I can almost feel the relief surging through the phone line. And sometimes I steal a grateful glance across to the great rotunda where a figure towers above the building’s bustling lobby.

I wanted to be a nurse from the time I was a little girl. My mom loves to show off a black-and-white snapshot of me as a four-year-old in a nurse’s outfit with my doll’s head all bandaged up. It looks like I’ve performed a craniotomy on it.

When I first came to Johns Hopkins 29 years ago, I actually specialized in such patients. I worked for a neurosurgeon who treated people with malignant brain tumors and ruptured cerebral aneurysms.

The operations were long and in those days the hospital didn’t have a designated rep to inform the families of what was happening during surgery. I would go back and forth from the OR to the waiting room, reassuring loved ones as best I could.

I can’t pretend it wasn’t stressful. A hospital is a place of both suffering and healing. But I found the perfect way to soothe my frayed nerves.

In the rotunda at the Broadway entrance was a 10-foot-high marble statue of Jesus, the Divine Healer. I could never walk by it without touching the toes and looking up to the serene face of Christ.

I asked God to give my patients strength to cope with what lay ahead, and myself the wisdom to help them. Sometimes I’d hum a hymn, one of the beautiful ones my mother sang in our small Methodist church. It always brought calm and reassurance.

Eventually I moved to administration. Hospitals had entered the era of managed care, and cost containment was imperative. I became the director of performance improvement—quite a title. I was constantly putting out fires.

“Lil, you’re going to burn out yourself before you’re forty,” my husband, Al, would warn me. But I cared about the hospital, even if I missed direct work with the patients.

One perfectly ordinary morning when I was 38, I felt something unusual in my right breast. I assumed it was just a blocked duct, something I’d had before. It would go away.

I had a mammogram, which showed it was a cyst that had returned. It was easily aspirated by the radiologist. He decided to do a baseline mammogram of my other breast, the left one, and there he saw something that actually warranted a biopsy.

Now I was the patient, frightened and unsure.

I was convinced the biopsy would be negative for cancer. Unfortunately, my doctor would not return from a conference for another few days. Because of my position at the hospital, I knew where to find the pathology report. I logged on to the data bank to see what my report was.

The words blurred in front of me: “ductal carcinoma...multiple foci...carcinoma.” I stared at the computer screen, expecting the grim reaper to rise out of it, then logged off hastily.

I hurried out of the hospital. I walked faster past the oncology corridor. For the first time I could remember, I didn’t touch the foot of the Divine Healer when I passed. Didn’t pray. Didn’t even look up.