Jeff’s Initial Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis

When someone finds out that they have cancer, especially anything that they put a number behind, that’s like a three or four, whatever that is, then that’s fairly significant. That scares people a lot. It’s not something that people can swallow very easily. Their tendency is to jump straight to the negative.

If you were sitting here with me, and it was just told to you that it was stage four, pancreatic cancer, or if it was, something less or more, whatever the opinion is, the first thing you got to do is shake that. You gotta leave the doctor. I drove away from Houston going, I appreciate your opinion, but that’s just your opinion.

God put doctors on the earth for a reason. I think they can do many good things, but they can’t do everything. The way I read it, or the way I’ve always understood it, I guess, is that worry is a sin, like, any other sin. It’s just against what the Bible teaches, what Jesus taught, and all of that.

Faith or Worry?

So what do you do? It takes as much energy, it probably takes more energy to worry than it does to be positive, and pray for healing, actually.

You can see it by some people at the grocery store or in traffic, they throw a finger up on you or whatever, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s… To me, it takes more effort to go through the day mad than to get up and go, thank you, God for another day, thank you for a beautiful day, and help me be a blessing to someone today.

The doctors aren’t bad people, they’re just not very good messengers. They go off of an understanding that this is the way it’s been done for 100 years, or 20 years, or 10 years, or whatever. Therefore this is the protocol. This is how we address things and this is how we talk about it.

God Has The FINAL Say

I don’t want to talk about any of that, because I’m not everybody else. You know, in my mind, I’m a child of God, and He’s gonna have the final say.

So I would just tell my wife, she would come in, and I’m in the hospital bed weighing 135 pounds, and she wants to talk about making arrangements. And I’m like, we’re not making arrangements, because I’m not gonna die. So she’d come in and tell my kids, ‘He’s lost it.’ You know, he thinks he’s fine. And I said, “I’m gonna be fine.” I could barely walk. I couldn’t walk 15 feet.

So yeah, I mean, evidence. If you’re looking at it, it would seem that way. But obviously, to me, faith is the belief in things that are unseen, not stuff that you can see. So you have to be able to go against what you’re looking at. I don’t have the answers. I don’t, I’m not perfect … I’m not anybody, I just know that this is the way I believe.

Whatever God’s calling is for you, He can make a way for you to get there, He can extend your days. I absolutely 100% guarantee that’s the case, if you will believe and be persistent, and keep calling on the Lord. He can and will answer.

Jeff’s Cancer History

Off and on, I’ve dealt with cancer of some form, since about 2007. The squamous cell started off with just a fair-skinned, red-haired kid, that got sunburned too many times when I was young. And it led to squamous cells getting into my lymph nodes, and turning into head and neck cancer, and it was in ’08. It had pretty much stayed gone up until, I’m going to say Valentine’s Day of 2015, so seven years or so.

I noticed a knot under my left armpit. It started turning into a mass and anyway began to grow, ping pong ball, golf ball, baseball all the way up to the size of a grapefruit, softball size. So I had that removed at MD Anderson, went through chemo a couple of times, and went through radiation and went through the surgery. And while going through this, I’m quite certain that I’m going to be cured, be healed, and get past it.

The doctors were not saying the same thing. So they had sent me home a couple of times, and my doctors up here, they didn’t seem to have any answers either, here in Dallas. So I went down again. I began losing weight in the summer of 2015. I thought it was gone, actually, because of the surgery and then going through radiation. Well, while I was going through radiation, that tumor started coming back in the same spot under my arm only this time it grew on the outside. And I’d never seen anything like it, it was it was something else. And it was growing at a pretty high rate of speed, in my opinion.

Relying on Faith and Prayer for Healing

Somewhere along the way, a guy calls me out of the blue. It was Wade, he said, “Hey, I got your name from a friend of my mom’s who goes to church with your mom in Missouri. She asked me if I would come and pray for you because you’re on a prayer list at church.” I said, “Absolutely.”  

Wade and a friend of his, Jeremy, go to church together, they came over and laid their hands on me and prayed. We went on that way and nothing seemed to happen right off the bat. I did notice it feeling better, what have you. But anyway, I still was trying to find medical reasons, because, at the end of the day, it wasn’t just magically gone. It’s not like magic, you have to continue praying and persist.

I decided to try a clinic in Mexico called the Hoxsey Clinic, which is a diet and alternative medicine medical center. So I went down there and did that, came back, and still nothing. We made another trip to MD Anderson. They basically told me to go home, good luck, and that you’ll probably, maybe, make it a year. They’d never seen anybody make it more than a year that was in my situation.

So I said, “I appreciate your opinion. But that’s not my opinion. And that’s not God’s opinion. And He will have the final say.”

I came back [to Dallas]. And again, Wade would come over, Wade and his wife, would come over and pray with me and lay hands on [me]. And I continued to pray. There are several passages that I would pray. That, I will not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord. And, the Lord is good, a stronghold in the time of trial, and He protects those that take refuge in Him.

I would pray these over and over throughout the day, and these guys would come over and pray with me every, probably every, couple of weeks there for a while. This tumor was now 17 centimeters, 18 centimeters, which is the size of a Nerf football on my side. And it began to act up and bleed and different things like this.

Prognosis Was Bleak

My wife took me to the emergency room two weeks before the Super Bowl of 2016. I spent 10 days in there and got out the week before. So anyway, 10 days in intensive care, I kept, you know, going through different treatments and transfusions and trying to get out of there.

I got down to about 130 pounds at this point from 190, 185, 190, I’m down to weighing 130 now. I got out of intensive care and continued praying. Wade would still come over to pray and lay hands on me and I began to feel better. You know, it wasn’t just overnight by any means. Anyway, little by little, we continued praying and the tumor started shrinking and going away.

Miraculous Recovery

By June of 2016, That tumor was pretty much completely gone. And I went back to work in August of 2016. From January 15-ish, probably of that same year, they told my wife to send me home with a hospital bed and get hospice care; that I wouldn’t make it [more than] four months, five months at the most. And I did have a hospital bed in my room. That’s where those guys would come over and pray with me. And I continued praying till today, knowing that I felt, God has the final say and ultimately, He does.

God can make a way when the doctors will give up on you. I have told many people who have had cancer that I’ve been in communication with for the last two or three years because they’ve called me to get my opinion and will I pray for them. They ask what I think and that kind of thing.

You know, some don’t make it, and some do. But at the end of the day, God does have the final say. I firmly believe that so… they’ll never change my opinion.

I had a daily or weekly nurse who came in and one day she came over and said, “This bandage seems too big.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s because it’s shrinking. I told you it was shrinking, it was going to go away.” And she’s like, “Well, yeah, but you sound half crazy half the time.” Because everybody looking at me thinks I’m crazy. And we went to the biggest bandage there was.

We were using a 12” by 18”. Think about the size of that 12” by 18” bandage, the size of a placemat. And then we started going back to a 16” by 12”, and then a 12” by 8” and we take it all the way down to where it’s completely gone. And I’m looking at it in the mirror and I mean, my brother saw it. I mean, everybody that sees it shrinking is like, “It’s a miracle.” There’s just no, no two ways about it.

Doctor’s Call Recovery a Miracle

I mean, even the doctors are like, “You’re a miracle.” The doctors—I still will go in and have them check my blood and check my hemoglobin and numbers and all that kind of stuff. They still go, there’s no question; this guy’s a miracle. There was no way that he was going to be alive.

And then the nurse, I’d say it’s probably June, she’s like, “Well, here’s your release papers”. And she said, “I can assure you there was never, ever a chance or a thought that I would ever be releasing you. Never have I seen that go this direction.” I said, “Well, now you have.”

I appreciate it. Thank God. I thank God every day.