My name is Jessica Hyde.  I pray that my story will be an encouragement to you and will help you to see that Jesus is faithful and He will get you through even your darkest moments.

I am 39 years old now, and I was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer when I was 18 years old.  I had sinus infection symptoms that were not going away.  They tried several antibiotics and none of them worked.  Finally, I went to the ear nose and throat doctor and he scoped my sinuses and they were very infected.  He then said he saw something there and he sent me down for an emergency CT scan.  The results were not good.  I had something that was bumped up against my spine and bumped up against my brain.  My left sinus cavity was almost completely filled with tumor and it continued into part of my right sinus cavity and went down my throat. They still did not really think it was cancer because the kind of cancer I had usually affects older Asian males.  I wasn’t older, I wasn’t Asian, and I am a woman, so the chances of me having this kind of cancer were slim.  After the CT scan the doctor said he wanted to do a biopsy.  He performed one and the results came back malignant.  I had between stage 3 and stage 4 cancer.  I went for radiation treatments at UCSF, as they were the only hospital around that had the type of radiation I needed.  I had 45 minutes of radiation a day, 5 days a week.  I also had chemotherapy at the same time.  Physically it was a hard time for me because I could not eat due to severe burns on the inside of my throat.  I had a feeding tube placed and so I was able to get the calories in that I needed to survive.  In August of 2001 I finished all of my treatments and I was considered to be in remission.  I still have to eat mostly by a feeding tube and my speech has been affected.  It is very difficult at times to understand me but that is one of my “war wounds” proving what Christ has carried me through.  It is an every day reminder of the power of God and of His hand of mercy on my life, and it is the one thing that makes people have to stop and listen closer to my testimony.  I also suffer from a very serious side effect of radiation called osteoradionecrosis.  This is a situation where parts of my clivus (a bone located at the base of my skull), and also parts of a few vertebrae in my spine, have died off due to lack of blood flow to the area.  I have gone through several rounds of IV antibiotics and hyperbaric oxygen to try and keep the diseased bone from spreading.  The only thing that gives me peace in this situation is knowing that Christ is, and has been, literally upholding my head for 20+ years and that He holds my life in His precious hands.  Glory be to God, I have my sight, most of my hearing, and even though I have a harder time and my voice is very mutated I can still talk. Now, this is the physical aspect of what went on with me, and what is still going on, but let me tell you the other side to my story, which is the message of hope I pray that I can pass on to other people who are in hard situations.

I grew up in church.  My dad is an elder at the church we go to.  From the time I was young I could tell you the Bible stories but I think it was more head knowledge then heart knowledge.  When I was in high school I kind of went through a time when I thought- “how do I know that all of this is real?  How do I know it is not just my parents or the church trying to convince me of something?”  I really struggled but I told the Lord, “I believe but please show yourself to me.”  He gave me verses and showed me He was real.  Then at 18 years old, when I was going through my cancer and facing death, I really felt like the Lord was saying “are you going to trust me with your life?  Even if you never get better, even if you never get married or have kids, are you still going to love me and trust me?   Am I enough?  At that time I gave the Lord my past, my present, and my future.  It was so important to me that I made sure my faith was real because I didn’t know if I was going to wake up the next morning or not.  The Lord has proven Himself to be enough.  

Now, I am human, and there are times that what I am going through does not feel like it is coming from the hands of a loving God.  I feel like I am being punished and I get so discouraged.  I fall down into the pit of despair but the awesome thing about the Lord is that even though I fall He does not let me stay down.  He picks me up and dusts me off and helps me to keep going. He is showing me that He won’t always save me from the furnace but He promises to walk with me through the fire.  He shows me that some of the greatest heroes of the faith in the Bible, had to go through some of the toughest experiences.  I think we all want to have the faith of Paul, without the prisons or the sleepless nights or the shipwrecks.  We want to have the courage of Daniel, without the threat of the lions den.  We want to have the victory of killing our Goliaths without having to face our giants.  What we don’t realize is that without those experiences those individuals would not have been the people of faith that they were.  I am constantly having to fight my emotions.  I have to realize that sometimes faith is getting up and walking with the Lord even though I may not “feel” like it.  I have to trust that the Lord loves me and is working all things for my good even though at times it may “feel” the exact opposite. Faith is trusting that the same One that I made Lord of my life is more than able to handle my day to day circumstances and my giant trials- even though at times they are seemingly impossible. 

Since the Lord spared my life I feel like he has given me a mission.  My mission is to make sure people going through hard situations are able to experience the peace that I had and still have to this very day.  This is the peace of knowing Jesus Christ as Savior.  This is the peace that passes all understanding.  The peace of knowing where you are going after you die and the peace of knowing that your life is in the hand of the Creator of the Universe.  There is no safer place to be.  I also am praying that I can encourage believers who are currently walking through a deep valley of pain and sorrow, that Jesus is faithful and He is really worth trusting.