An Improver

I know it isn't my right to write about the medical and personal lives of my students, but their life stories are a reminder of the Lord's goodness. One in particular has been dealing with health issues since she was a baby and has in the last few years been dealing with cancer. To be honest I'd lived fairly ignorant of the process of cancer until I met her. Staff meetings revealed that she would again have to go for a check up or that a pain in her side would leave her out for the day. And all I could do was imagine it made the girl really tired all the time, and that's as far as I could understand it. 

I'd never known a person with cancer. Not one this close.

I met her as a freshman. She had long brown hair then. When her mother served on our school board, they'd invited me over for steak. They can grill up a good one. I sat salivating over its peppery, juicy tenderness as she told me about her daughter's heart transplant surgery when my student was a baby. And then we played games and my student eagerly chatted about her best friends.

Despite her medical needs through the years, she remains a bright and energetic student now into her senior year. She was fine for a short time into her sophomore year, and then there was news. She would have to go through treatments. They had found various spots. 

That whole year she continued to finish my sophomore English class, declaring often, I might add, that she was not a lover of reading or writing. I smiled though, because she wasn't (and isn't) the type of student to give up when she dislikes the material. She would turn in various poems and responses and even in the summer we'd email and communicate through her tutor. I'm certain that many students would have pushed all the work away, declared that it demanded too much, especially because the amount of attention on her health was substantial. But every due date I gave her, every requirement, every assignment, every quiz--she was always ready and she didn't complain. Not once. 

She went through another round in her junior year, and by that time she was taking Media with me. We decided it wasn't necessary for her so we didn't continue with it. 

This year she has been in school throughout the semester and things are looking good for next semester. In fact, she just went in for another scan and her mind is at ease because the doctors told her the recent pain in her side was just a cracked rib. (Just a cracked rib!) So when she told me this on Friday, I smiled, because for many a cracked rib would be their hardest medical scare to date. And kids her age just don't deal with those things...not typically. 

But I don't find her peers to be ignorant of her situation. They ask her about things, and she tells them, and they pray for her, because what else can they do? They cannot bear her pain, only witness it and try their best to appreciate their own health. 

Because of her I know how I am blessed by God. If he can take a tiny baby and allow medical professionals the ability to transplant a tiny heart and allow this baby to grow up and to be positive and happy and an improver and confident and funny and to share her life story in a chapel time to a hundred other students...if God can allow bravery to come from a small frame of a young woman, then surely he can know your heart (both physical and figurative!).

Tomorrow she presents her Composition portfolio. She has been working hard all semester, and it makes me proud. I always pray that students will see improvement in their writing, not perfection. And she did. 

"Miss Boman," she said, "I really thought I'd hate this class. I'm just not. I'm just not the writing type. But it was good. I learned to like it." And that made me laugh.