Deb

Deb was moving into her new home with the help of some wonderful friends... I'll come back to narrate when I have a little extra time! :)

Holly's Photos - Part 2

Deb's Bio

I am honored to be included in this photo journal project. I have known Jen since she was a baby, and her Mom Beth, happens to be one of my wonderful friends, God has blessed me with. Jen also was our photographer that took the last family picture we would have all together, My husband Art, myself and our three handsome boys – or young men as they would prefer I’m sure! We knew Art was getting weaker, and the cancer was taking over more of his body…but we did not know that 16 days later he would die. Leaving me a widow at age 50 and our three boys without a father. We knew he was going to die, but we hoped we could have the summer together.

It has been quite a whirlwind for the past 2 ½ years. The fall of 2006 Art was having some discomfort and difficulty swallowing. He said, “Debbie, food just isn’t going down very well. It seems to get stuck.” One day turned into another and finally he went in and had an Endoscopy done in Grand Forks. I went with him. We were concerned but were prepared for Art needing a procedure to stretch the esophagus. He had a long history of acid reflux, and was –I would say- high strung, even though he did not appear to be to others. He also had smoked for several years before being able to quit. It was such a battle for him. I had pleaded with him during our early years of marriage for him to quit smoking.

Well, this particular day, we were told the news that changed the course of our family and my life. The Endoscopy had revealed a tumor at the junction of the Esophagus and the Stomach….Carcinoma of the GE Junction, was the diagnosis. We were stunned, and I felt numb. After much discussion with family, we decided that Art should receive medical attention at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. He wanted to wait until the deer hunting season was over, as he wanted to take our 3 boys hunting all together as was their special yearly adventure.

Once in Rochester, Art started his Radiation and Chemo treatments. We rented a furnished apartment that was near the clinic. Our youngest son came along for two weeks, and he came to some of the treatments and appointments. Art had complications from the Radiation. It enflamed his spinal cord tissue and caused severe back pain. He had had two previous back surgeries. Due to the pain, he actually collapsed on his knees in the middle of the night, and I frantically called ER at Mayo! The pain meds would not stay down due to the nausea from the Radiation and Chemo, so he started vomiting…he ended up in the hospital with a PEJ Tube which became his life line for nutrition for pretty much the rest of his life. The PEJ Tube allowed him to take meds along with formula to keep his calorie count. He had difficulty with vomiting and continued to vomit 2 to 4 times a day for 5 months. My big strong man, with beautiful dark tanned skin and dark hair (graying) was quickly loosing weight.

We were able to come home for Christmas for one month then back to Mayo for the big surgery. Art had the Ivor Lewis procedure done, meaning the Esophagus and part of the stomach was removed. The remaining stomach was stretched upward and attached to the small part of the esophagus that remained in the throat area. He no longer had a stomach, but we hoped and prayed the cancer would be gone. This surgery was on Valentine’s Day. He had bought a Black Hills Gold necklace and earrings with a sweet card and placed it in my suitcase so I could open it before he went into surgery. It was a long awful surgery.

Once back home, Art developed fluid around the lungs in the chest cavity. He became so winded, and was getting weaker. He was hospitalized again, this time in Grand Forks, then we ended up taking the ambulance back to Mayo. The problem was not subsiding.

Our boys were ages 15, 18, and 23. They were on their own for such long periods. We stayed in touch by phone. I was so torn. I worried about my husband, my sons, the bills, missing so much work, and what was going to happen. Even though I was weary and spent, we both had faith and trust that God knew what He was doing, and we would be obedient to His will. The prayers of family and friends, as well as cards and gifts of money was overwhelming to us. Food and groceries came to the boys back home and we had a large following on the Caringbridge website.

Things started to look like they were settling down. Our second son was graduating from Highschool and I was planning the Open House to celebrate this event, as well as trying to get back to work. That summer was difficult. We use to enjoy riding motorcycle together, eating as a family, and doing things together. Art had been a strong man going to work every day and being the provider. No longer could he enjoy eating, and he seemed to be loosing interest in life. For everything he went through it was certainly understandable.

Our families and friends were huge supports for us. They continued to call, send cards, prayed for us and came for short visits. We felt so loved and blessed to have such kind people around us. Our Church took us in their arms and held us up, wanting to do whatever they could to be a support. Another big surgery came in July of 2008. A stripping of the Parietal Pleura in hopes of stopping the fluid from building around the lungs. Another period of healing was needed. Art did not seem to be getting any better. I cried as I shared my great concern with family and friends.

In January of 2009, the routine checkup at Mayo determined that the cancer was once again active and back with a vengeance in the abdomen. Art decided not to go through anymore treatments. And in tears we said good-bye to the Mayo Dr.s and staff. It had been a wonderful place for medical care, but now they had done all they could.

We came back home and told the news to our loved ones. It was very sad. It was so hard for the boys. They did not know how to process this. Our youngest was playing Basketball in HS and starting to hang out with kids we had never heard of, our middle son was struggling with college but trying to spread his wings with a job- an apartment and a girlfriend, and our oldest was working and attending Grad School in Colorado. Lots of struggles for a Mother to watch!

We decided to do some traveling. Art and I flew to Arizona to spend time with three of his brothers and then to Colorado to spend time with our oldest son. Art was getting weaker and weaker. He enjoyed being with family but was quiet and in pain. He must have known that his time was getting short, but we hoped we could have the summer months together sitting in the back yard. Then in March, we called Hospice and began working with them. Art started using oxygen in April. We had a hospital bed moved in on a Monday, and by Tuesday he was in it. He declined so quickly. It was a blur, but our Pastor, friends, and family were there for us. Our son and my sister were able to fly in from Colorado before Art died. I don’t know what I would have done without my sister. She literally became my right arm as we cared and tried to make Art comfortable. When he died, he was surrounded by his loved ones. Were had been married for 30 ½ years. I had never been on my own. We were so use to having each other as soul mates. We did not necessarily do everything together, but we were best friends as well as lovers.

So now it has been one year since Art died. The boys and I have made it this far. I miss him terribly. I know that God has a plan for my life and just when I feel despair, He sends my friends or family to bless me in some way. He is a wonderful God and I could not go on without His strength. I bought a Town House in Grand Forks and now have my house in Thompson for sale. It is hard to leave the house that we built but it is a house for a family. My youngest son is graduating from High School next month, my oldest son is getting married this summer, and my middle son just got offered a new job which he is very excited about and plans to start college again in the fall. I am so thankful for my job, and my wonderful friends. I also have two of the best sisters one could have. I know that I can call them anytime and they will be there for me.

Funny how things go in life. My Mother became a widow when I was 4 years old. I am the youngest in my family, and now I am a widow. My father died young and my husband died young at age 54. Mom is now 88 years old and a wise wonderful woman. She is an encouragement to me and we have such heartfelt talks. I have so many questions I want to ask her. Right now I am in the middle of trying to get settled in the Town House. My two sons have moved with me. That is a comfort and helps me feel more at home. And of course, Mickey, our little Bichon, is trying to adjust probably just as much as the rest of us.

I wonder what the Lord has for me now? I don’t know, but I do know that in Psalms 57:3 it says, “He will send down help from heaven…because of His love and His faithfulness…” And I can tell you without a doubt, that is true.

Holly's Bio

My name is Holly Sabelman and I was born and raised in Sanfransico, CA in 1978.
I was adopted in to a wonderful home at an early age by Eric and Maryann Sabelman. I am deeply thankful for my extended family of which most of them are living in CA. I also have a younger brother Matt who is currently a paramedic in Alaska.
From a very early age, I absolutely loved athletics! Not only did I love the completion and drive but I enjoyed the friendships made along the way. To this day, I still have a handful of good friends whom I was teammates with.
My dream as a child was to be a Division 1 basketball player and make it to the WNBA one day. Because of this the basketball court was where I spent the majority of my time but I also very much enjoyed playing soccer and softball.
I was well on my way to play basketball in college but during a game my junior year in high school I had a career ending injury to my knee. I remember clearly the day when one of the doctors told me that after surgery I would possibly never be able to run and might walk with a limp my entire life.
At that moment all my hopes and dreams seemed to crash down. I remember saying to my mom after leaving the hospital one day that "I felt as if I had lost my best friend."
This was the first severe struggle I had faced in my life up to that point. I went in to the next season of my life giving my all to physical therapy and was able to return to the soccer field as a goal keeper and on to the softball field.
Also at this time I started to attend church and a short while later I accepted the Lord as my Savior. This was in part of the amazing strength and encouragement my friends and family showed me throughout the whole time. I began to see that God had a plan for my life even if it was different than I had one day imagined.
I began to see and experience that I was being called in to the ministry. I was able to see this through the opportunities that I was given to help people and be a leader to them as they went through difficult times on and off the field.
I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Northwestern Bible College, in St. Paul MN and graduated with Christian Ministry and Bible. I had the privilege of serving in two churches in the Twin Cities area and then felt that seminary was the next step in continuing to serve the Lord with my life and career.
I very much enjoyed my years of seminary as I attended both Bethel, in St. Paul MN as well as completing my degree from Masters Divinity Seminary in IN in 2005. I really enjoyed working at Caribou Coffee throughout seminary because I love people and I love coffee! This was also wonderful training ground for serving people and providing them with a good experience.
In June of 2008 I accepted the position of Children and Family Minister at HOPE Evangelical Covenant Church here in Grand Forks. I quickly found a sense of home in Grand Forks and felt overjoyed as I started to serve the Families of HOPE Church. Life was going real well...I had been given a wonderful job and was looking forward to moving to Grand Forks with my fiance at the time. We both we enjoying moving here and he was very excited since Grand Forks was home for him. I remember being so excited planning a September wedding and found myself counting down the days until I was able to say "I do" to the love of my life. Life however ended up taking a different path than I had expected. Two months in to my position at HOPE Church my fiance left me and broke off the wedding. I was in shock and completely broken-hearted.

I found myself again at a point in life that hurt very much and was very hopeless. I was so thankful for my church family here in Grand Forks and for all the support of friends and family far away. I was filled with a sense of encouragement and the people who came around help me draw on God for strength. Even though it was a very hard time of struggle, God grew my character and faith in Him in so many ways. Not only that but it also helped me a great deal to know how to serve people and come alongside them in the church.

As life was coming together again for me, in the Winter of 2009 doctors found that I had a tumor on my skull. It had been causing a lot of health problems for me and I had major surgery to remove it the following May. I was fortunate to find that it was not cancerous but I had a fair amount of recovery to go through and it was another season full of struggle for me. Again though God worked in and through me and allowed my story to be one of encouragement and hope for others. Truly in my greatest weakness He was (and is) my strength!

It is my hope and prayer that my story will always be something that encourages others to never give up and to draw on the strength of God. I hope my life is a real authentic example of that to all the people that God brings in to my life and on to my life's journey.

Holly Sabelman

Here's Holly, the women's pastor at Hope Evangelical Covenant Church. I'll be posting more photos soon, and I'll also fill in information about each photo when I post the rest.

Dani McCann

I’m Dani, a single working mother of two children. I have been on my own for about two and a half years now. I grew up in a single parent household, being raised by my dad since I was very young. He was busy working, and so I spent most of my time with my grandparents and his sister (my godmother) Carol. I never had a strong mother figure in my home, but Carol was basically a mother to me. Words cannot express how much she means to me. She is now in heaven and looking down on us.

For some reason, I kind of always knew I was going to be a mother. Never having a mother around was very confusing. As a child at 3-4 years old, my dad would say "your mother is on the phone, she wants to talk to you", and I had no idea what he was talking about or who or what she was. She left when I was about 2 and came back to live in the area when I was a little over 6, but I still lived with my dad. It was very scary having to go stay with her every other weekend, being that I had no idea who she was. I hated staying with her due to her bad habits. I never knew what kind of mood she would be in or who would be around or where she would take me. We were never very close. I have 5 younger half-sisters who I love and like to spend as much time with as I can. They are ages 16, 14 ,8, 6, and 9 months. I’m trying to be a positive figure that they can look up to. 

When I was 17, I met my children’s father. We got engaged after a short 3 months, moved in together right when I turned 18, and very soon thereafter I found out that I was pregnant with my daughter. He became jealous, controlling, and eventually abusive. The relationship ended in a protection order very shortly after my son was born in July of 2008. Their dad is not a steady father figure in their lives, and I don’t ever expect him to be. His mother tries to help, but she is very busy. My dad helps me out a lot, along with my sisters. I have a very loving and supportive family and wonderful friends. I love my job at the nursing home as a CNA; I have been there for almost 3 years. I would like to work more, but not being able to afford childcare puts me in a bind. 

I’m always trying to find friends/relatives who can babysit for free because I can’t afford to pay them. My kids are usually with me for the everyday things that I need to do; laundry, appointments, etc... it’s exhausting and sometimes frustrating, but I would rather have my kids with someone who loves and cares about them than someone who doesn’t. 

When I was 19 (and my daughter was only a few months old), I found my mom with syringes in her room. My younger sister, who was 11 at the time, and had dealt with my mother and her unhealthy habits and lived with her since she was born. She was very upset and thought she would have to deal with it forever. Everyone had known about her habits for a long time and had even reported to social services etc... but nothing was ever done. I decided that it was time to do something, being as there were 2 other younger children in the house as well. So I called 911 and told them to come right away (being as no one knew how long the stuff would be there) for the children's sake. They didn’t come until the next day, but I got the call to come over and watch the kids while they arrested my mother. They basically said that they didn’t know how long it would take to decide what would happen, where she would go, etc... so I said I’d stay with them. My dad came to help when he could, even though my sisters are not his children, and we were there for about a month. My mother finished rehab, and she has been clean for almost 4 years now. 

I plan to start school for hair design, and my kids will be going to a daycare during the day while I’m at school. I am a little nervous, but after 3 years of being with them 24/7, I need a break for my mental sanity. Plus, they are big enough and will love to hang around other kids and tell me all about what they did at the end of the day. So for now its a struggle, but I know that in the future they will appreciate it and be thankful and know how much I love them.

Bobbi Jo Brenner

BOBBI JO BRENNER

As I write a mini-biography for Jen ’s project, I have found it a bit difficult to know what to say. There are so many things I want to say, but putting them all together is not as easy as you would think. Many have known about my story for years, and I have had tons of prayers go out to me and just as many questions asked to me about my situation. As much as I am thankful for peoples’ concern, I wonder sometimes if I am being pitied. This project is about strengths and struggles, and I want to be completely honest about the struggles, yet I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. To get the entire story, though, the pain needs to be revealed first, in order for the strength to shine though. Viktor E. Frankel, a survivor of the Holocaust, said about his suffering, “Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.” Like all of the women in this project there is meaning to the suffering, we just don’t always see it. I want to be able to convey to the reader that Hope is available and the strength that I have is found in that Hope.

Don’t let the smile fool you. Although it is genuine, it has not always come easy. There are days when tears flow and I wonder just how much longer I will have to do dialysis. I have had two transplants; my first one was in 1991, from a woman who died from a brain tumor. I had it for four years before my body rejected it in May of 1994. I was back on dialysis for a few more months before I received a perfectly matched kidney from my younger brother. Despite the hope I had at that time to be free of dialysis, I lost it due to a blood clot. Because of all the trauma that happened to my body, I ended up on life support for a few days and once again depending on dialysis to live.

It has been almost 15 years since my last transplant, and I find myself today with the possibility of receiving my third kidney from my husband’s sister, Kristine. I am experiencing a flood of emotions as I face the approaching day that the pre-transplant treatment begins. April 26^th is when it will all start and for the following two weeks Mayo clinic doctors will try to literally wipe out my immune system, so that my body has a better chance of not rejecting Kristine’s kidney. Since my past two transplants and numerous blood transfusions over the years, my body has built up a high level of antibodies in my blood. Antibodies are the very cells that attack and reject a transplanted organ. Typically these antibodies are good for the body because they protect it from illnesses. However, they are not good to have if you are waiting for an organ transplant.

It is my first year anniversary of doing dialysis at home, and it has proven to be the best medical decision I have made in a very long time. My body is healthier and now better ready to receive a new kidney and to with stand all the medical procedures I will need to go through, before the transplant is even possible. I am scared to do it all again, knowing this time there is more risk involved and more “prep work” that needs to happen. I have spent the last year building up my body and now in less than two weeks; they will begin tearing down again. I have wrestled with whether or not I even wanted to try it again, but I cannot see myself doing dialysis for another 15 years. I don’t want to have to go trough all things procedures again, but I also don’t want to do dialysis any more, either. The doctor’s have been upfront with me that there is no guarantee that this will work. I know form experience that this is true, yet I am at this point willing to go forward with it knowing full well the risks and what it will take, but also living into the reality that it may not work. I may come home without a kidney, or not come home at all.

Day one will begin with a blood draw at 7: 30am followed by an appointment with the transplant nurse coordinator at 7:45. By 8:20 am I will have an EKG performed. From there I will have a chest x-ray done at 9:00 am. After that, at 9:30 am, I will visit with the medical review board that over sees nephrology and hypertension. At 10 o’clock I will meet with the kidney doc, Dr. J.M. Gloor. By 11:00 I will have to have a central line (a catheter) placed in a vein below my shoulder, so that they can begin the procedures to kill off my antibodies. At 1:30 pm I will have my first plasmapheresis exchange treatment, which will take another hour. From there I will receive a drug called immunoglobulin intervenes or IVIG. This will take about four hours to infuse.

Day One---Finished.

I do dialysis 5 days a week, so I can choose which days to skip as long as they are not back-to-back. Since I will skip a dialysis treatment on day one, I will need to do dialysis on day two. So, Willi and I will get up early to do the dialysis, before I head back to the clinic to do another round of the plasma exchange and IVIG. For the next seven days this will be the routine. I have to make sure I do the dialysis before the IVIG, otherwise, the dialysis treatment would filter out the drug. After day seven they will check to see if the treatments are working to destroy my antibodies. If it does work I will receive Kristine’s kidney on May 10^th. If it does not work, I will be put into a research study using a drug called Valcade. This is a drug that is used to fight the blood cancer myloma. I will need to be in Rochester for three months for this study and will receive the drug twice a week for those three months. Before and after the three-month treatment I will have a bone marrow biopsy performed to check the levels of the antibodies. I have been for warned that the treatments are just as mentally draining as they are physically.

Many look at the new kidney as my hope for a better life, but to be honest, that is not where I find my Hope. As difficult as this life has been, my struggles have opened my eyes to a bigger problem. Just like the physical body builds antibodies to protect itself from harm, the soul does a similar thing. To protect itself from pain, from getting hurt, from feeling disappointment, it builds its’ own form of protection: Soul Antibodies. I have had many questioned in my life about why suffering happens and have even been mad at God for all that I have been through. Yet, god still pursues me even in my pain, my anger, my grief and my disbelief. Though a long journey so far, I have come to a place where my heart realizes I cannot do this in my own power. I need something bigger than myself to make it. I need God. This is where I find my Hope and this is where I receive the strength to keep moving forward. The strength I have is in Him and in Him alone.

Jesus says, “My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.” Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and begun appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations with stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size- abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.

II Corinthians 12:8-10 (The Message)