The result that arrived during the operation

One · What happened

A nodule on Sunday, a diagnosis on Tuesday

“A very initial phase” and “well localized” were the words Pope Leo XIV used on Sunday for a nodule that doctors had found in his lung, according to ABC News. Surgeons operated on Tuesday 13 October at the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome. According to the Holy See Press Office, he spent roughly three hours in the operating room, with about ninety minutes of surgery inside that. The lower lobe of his right lung was removed with a video-assisted technique. His personal physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone, prepared the statement with Professor Stefano Margaritora, who performed the operation.

Tissue examined during the operation, the Holy See Press Office said, “confirmed the diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma, as suspected by the preoperative tests.” The statement added that he woke as expected. He was back in his room on the tenth floor soon after. More tests were due in the coming days, among them a histological examination of the tissue taken out. At this stage, the statement said, doctors had not yet discussed whether further treatment would be needed after the surgery. The reports of 13 October gave no stage. ABC News said the hospital stay was expected to last about a week.

Two · What it is doing

The chart you can read before your own

“Lung adenocarcinoma” is the full medical name the Holy See Press Office gave the cancer. Whoever taps the headline carries that word through the rest of the afternoon, and within seconds has placed the man somewhere. Some feel the news the way they would feel a relative’s. Others have argued with his office for years and feel next to nothing, and the nothing cost them no effort. He is somebody’s patient. Arguments over what the office is and what it should be will outlast this diagnosis. A bed on the tenth floor of a Roman hospital is no place to have them.

The statement named seven doctors, four on the surgical team and three on the anesthesia team, and said his personal physician was with him at the hospital. Anyone who has waited on a scan result can add that up to about the best attention a body can get. The cancer turned up in the preoperative tests all the same. A reader runs the numbers on his own lungs, or on the screening that came due last spring. Then he does something odd and goes looking for the stage. Each update about a stranger’s chart takes the place of one phone call about his own.

The news wakes an older thing in people. Readers who admire Pope Leo XIV may feel a small jolt, as if a life of prayer should have come with an exemption from lung cancer. Those who do not admire him have a jolt of their own to hide in the plain fact that a man in his position got the same word as everyone else. Both groups are meeting the dread of dying with their own name on it. A stranger’s chart is easier to study than a calendar with a doctor’s name written on one of its days.

Three · Where the ground is

Hezekiah turned his face to the wall

The prophet Isaiah came to King Hezekiah in his sickness and said, “Thus says the LORD: Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover” (Isaiah 38:1). The king turned his face to the wall, prayed, and “wept bitterly” (Isaiah 38:2–3). By then the Assyrian army had taken the fortified cities of Judah, and the king lay sick with Jerusalem under threat. Isaiah 38 names no sin behind the sickness and gives no reason for it.

“I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life,” the LORD answered through the same prophet whose first word had been a sentence of death (Isaiah 38:5). That word was spoken to one king about his own body and his own besieged city. Nobody reading Isaiah is promised the same by it. Hezekiah recovered and then he died, as the books of Kings record. What he wrote after his recovery looks past the fifteen years, “in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back” (Isaiah 38:17).

Burdened beyond his strength

Paul wrote to the Corinthians about a danger in Asia that had burdened him beyond his strength, so that “we despaired of life itself.” He went on, “we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8–9). The God who raises the dead raised Jesus in the body on the third day, after He died on a cross for sinners. A believer who trusts Him is kept through a clean scan and through a bad one. The same Lord holds the lung removed in Rome and the lung working in your own chest. The passage promises no recovery to anyone who reads it.

Where the sick get carried

Elders are who a sick Christian sends for, according to James’s instruction to a congregation, “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him” (James 5:14). To those same Corinthians Paul wrote, “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). Elders and the people they gather carry that verse into a hospital room. Anyone who keeps putting off the question of Jesus Christ can take it to the same elders by way of one phone call to a local church.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

The next bulletin from Rome may add a stage or a plan for treatment. Not one of the five waits for it.

1. 01

   Open the result you have been stepping around.

   Check the portal or the mailbox for the scan or the screening you have left alone since the summer, and open it. If nothing is waiting, call the office that sent the reminder and take the first day they offer. Pray over the envelope or the screen for a minute first. David wrote, “I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears” (Psalm 34:4). Tell your wife or a friend from church which day you picked.

2. 02

   Ask God to be near the man on the tenth floor.

   Pray for Pope Leo XIV by name as a sick man in a hospital bed. Paul described Epaphroditus in his letter to the Philippians. The man “was ill, near to death” before “God had mercy on him” (Philippians 2:27). If you caught yourself shrugging at the news, tell the Lord so and ask Him for a softer heart toward a stranger. Pray it once on the day you read this and again on Sunday.

3. 03

   Go and sit with the sick person on your church’s list.

   On Sunday, ask your pastor or one of the elders who in the congregation is in treatment or waiting on results. Go to that person’s house within the week for an hour. Paul asked the Lord to “grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus.” That man “often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains” and, on reaching Rome, “searched for me earnestly and found me” (2 Timothy 1:16–17). Bring nothing to fix and ask for nothing.

4. 04

   Set your house in order on one sheet of paper.

   Write down the name of your doctor and the drawer where your will is kept. Put the sheet where your spouse or your grown child can find it. Joseph told his brothers, “I am about to die, but God will visit you” (Genesis 50:24), and before long he made them swear to carry up his bones (Genesis 50:25). Tell the person who would need the sheet where it is.

5. 05

   Take your fear of dying to your pastor.

   Ask your pastor for half an hour this week. Tell him that the news of a stranger’s cancer has stirred your own dread of dying, and ask what he says to a man who is afraid. From prison Paul wrote, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Let him pray for you before you leave.