Posted by At the beginning of 2023, when author Lisa Hendey should have been celebrating the publication of her latest children’s book, she was met with troubling news. After listening to her intuition that something wasn’t right with her body, Lisa received a diagnosis of stage 3 breast cancer.
The months that followed brought physically draining treatment and recovery, but they also included spiritual support from the people who loved her, as well as an enriching prayer routine which Lisa dubbed “the waiting rosary.”
With the worst now behind her, Lisa is finally promoting her book about the wonders of God’s creation, titled “I Am Earth’s Keeper,” as well as sharing her cancer journey so that others going through similar experiences might glean some wisdom from what she endured.
“I was treated for a much, much less invasive form of breast cancer 15 years ago and went through a little surgery back then, radiation, took medication for five years, and then really never looked back,” Lisa recalled during a “Christopher Closeup” interview (podcast below).
That past experience led her to conduct self-exams every month. While doing one recently, Lisa didn’t feel any lumps, but noticed that something looked amiss. Her instincts told her to check things out, even though she wasn’t due for a mammogram for several months. Though Lisa’s doctor was reluctant at first, she agreed to her request for a mammogram, which didn’t reveal any problems. But Lisa kept following her instincts, which led to her getting an MRI, which led to her diagnosis.
Lisa said, “The form of cancer that I was diagnosed with is invasive lobular cancer, and it’s a little tricky. Most women will know that we typically look for lumps in our breasts, that we try to feel something. [Invasive lobular cancer] actually spreads in a way that’s cellular, so it doesn’t create a mass. It can even be missed on mammograms. I have regular mammograms, but this was not caught the last time around. The doctor told me that this has probably been growing for at least a year, if not longer. So by the point that we actually intervened, it was quite large, and I ended up having a double mastectomy and reconstruction and radiation…So it was really good that I listened to my gut on this and that I didn’t say, ‘Well, this is a busy month, I’ll just wait until June.’…I’m feeling very grateful and blessed.”
Lisa’s recovery was more painful and slow than she had anticipated. She is now on medication for the next five years, but finally getting back to feeling like her old self again. Thankfully, she has had tremendous support throughout her ordeal. Her husband is a physician, so he was able to tend to her needs in the best way possible. She was also surrounded by spiritual support.
“If you’re facing anything like this,” noted Lisa, “I’d encourage you to ask for anointing of the sick. I’m at a Paulist parish with the Paulist Fathers here in Los Angeles, St. Paul the Apostle, and I’m very blessed that our Fathers are good friends of mine. They surrounded me with beautiful spiritual care, both in offering anointing, and hearing my confession before I went in for surgery, and coming to visit me in the hospital, and regularly checking in with me. One of the most beautiful spiritual moments for me following surgery was to have my husband [Greg], who is a convert to the faith…the first Sunday that I had to miss Mass, Greg brought the Eucharist home to me. He was commissioned as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. And I cried big, fat, happy tears to have my husband bring me the body of Christ. That was a great gift. Our parish community was cooking meals for me…Mass was offered and all kinds of things lifted me up.”
During the times when she was feeling terribly sick, Lisa could barely muster the strength to pray. But she said she felt the intercessory prayers of others giving her strength. And when she was able to pray herself, the rosary was the prayer she turned to the most.
Lisa said, “If you’re undergoing the kind of radiation treatment that I had, which was five and a half weeks, every day you’re in the same place going in to do it surrounded by people who are very ill…I decided I’m not taking my phone in there. I’m going to try to focus on praying. If I have to wait – which inevitably you do when you’re in a medical care situation – I’m going to use that time to be praying for my fellow patients. And so I started praying what I would call a ‘waiting rosary.’ I would count 10 heads in the waiting room and intentionally try to, without looking like I’m staring at them, look at the people that were in the room with me and pray in that moment for their intentions. Then that waiting time went by so quickly.”
With the hardest parts of her cancer treatment behind her, Lisa is finally focused on discussing her latest children’s book, “I Am Earth’s Keeper,” which finds its foundation in several sources: St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon,” in Pope Francis’s call for us to care for God’s creation in his encyclical “Laudato Si,” in Lisa’s lifelong love for nature, and in a photo taken by a friend of hers.
“The entire inspiration for this book,” Lisa explained, “was a photo that was taken by a dear friend of mine who lives in Mississippi, near where my parents used to live. One morning, [he] was out on the pond near his house…It was at a moment of sunrise, he took this beautiful photo where the sun or the sky was reflected in the stillness of the water…He shared it on Facebook, and he said, is the sky up or down? And something about that photo and the majesty of that moment jumped into my heart. That day, I sat and wrote the poem that would eventually become this book. I just could not get it out of my head.”
The rhyming book, with lavish illustrations by Giuliano Ferri, only takes around five to 10 minutes to read. Lisa hopes that families or classrooms that read it together have conversations about what they can do to be better stewards of God’s creation. Lisa even has activities and worksheets available to offer guidance to anyone who sends her an email at LisaHendey “at” gmail.com.
Lisa noted that everything she has endured this past year instilled her with an even deeper appreciation for St. Francis’s view of the world, which she shares in “I Am Earth’s Keeper.” Lisa concluded, “St. Francis…reminds us that the natural creation around us is not just put there for us to use at our will, but really that we’re called to live in union with everything around us. I think one of the gifts of being called to slow down because of illness is that it caused me to stop and to see the little details that, perhaps in my haste, I may have been missing before this.”
(To listen to my full interview with Lisa Hendey, click on the podcast link):
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