The Hero Within Karen Hall

Courageously Facing Childhood Cancer, Part 1 with Dirk and Sharla Gardner

• Dirk and Sharla Gardner • Season 1 • Episode 65

Share episode

Send us a text

What if you suddenly lost your job of 17 years, and your child was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, all without the safety net of medical insurance? I invite you to join me as I sit down with Dirk and Sharla Gardner, a couple who faced these horrific trials head on. Their story unfolds, filled with suspense, hardship, and unexpected blessings. Dirk and Sharla reveal the power of love and faith as they navigate the stormy seas of life, as they turn toward the Lord, forging a path of resilience and hope.

Finding strength in faith when you're in the throes of despair isn't easy. The Gardners share their emotional journey, one where they had to lean on the Lord even when they felt the heavens were closed. They discuss, with heart-wrenching honesty, the pain of telling their son about his cancer diagnosis, and how they managed to find comfort in their faith and each other. Their story is filled with twists and turns, including the miraculous provision of a supplementary insurance that saved them from financial ruin.

Dirk and Sharla discuss their choice to trust in the Lord, even when their future seemed uncertain. They candidly discuss the aftermath of their son's surgery, and their constant battle to maintain their faith. Their journey is a testament to the power of faith in the face of adversity. Listen in as they inspire us with their incredible story, spreading love and hope in the darkest of times. Stay tuned for Part 2 to hear the rest of their inspiring story!

Speaker 1:

Hey there, welcome back. I'm Karen Hall, your host of the Hero Within podcast. I'm passionate about sharing inspiring true stories of unsung heroes who've overcome some of life's most challenging adversities. Come along with me and learn how you too can find hope and healing to return to love. Today, in part one of our two-part series with Dirk and Charlotte Gardner, we discuss the beginning of severe trials in their lives, when they felt the rug pulled out from beneath them. When Dirk left his job of 17 years as the city parks and recreation director to work for a friend, but then suddenly he got laid off During the economic downturn. He suffered one job loss after another and eventually Charlotte had to enter the workforce for the first time in their married life. Then, while still without the employee benefit of medical insurance, their second oldest child was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer in a tumor in his spinal cord. Dirk and Charlotte share how they felt their faith stretched during this experience as they clung to the Lord, to their faith and to each other.

Speaker 1:

I'd like to welcome our guests today and I'd like to introduce Dirk and Charlotte Gardner. They are my dear friends and neighbors. For gosh, how long have we been neighbors? Probably 20 years. They have just brought so much light and love and joy into my life and their examples and their influence on my family and myself and my husband. They have been such a blessing. So I wanted to have you meet them and hear their stories. And, Dirk, if you could go ahead and start and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Speaker 2:

I worked my first career in Parks and Recreation and I got in there not because of the money but because of something that I knew I'd love to do, and it was a great way to involve my family, my kids, as they were growing up. It was fantastic. I really, really loved what I did. But after about 17 years this is about as far as I want to go with this and I was getting tired of bureaucracy in the city government. We were making it work financially, we lived on a budget and I was fine with that. And then I was approached by a good friend to get out of that, get into development and management of property that he had and was building a hotel, and I thought, wow, this is exciting. I thought, okay, now that I've got my MBA, I'm on top of it, I could go anywhere. So I quit my job with the city as a Parks and Recreation Director and started working with him, and at first it was exciting, but it wasn't passionate for me. Working on car washes or hotels, it was good, but the problem started about a year and a half later. So here I'm, 17 years into a career, gave it up a year and a half later, 2008 rolls around and that's when the economy tanked right and that didn't really affect me ever when I was working for a city. But one day he said we got to let you go and I was like, wait, what that doesn't. Does that really happen? I've heard it happening to other people, but it really happened to me. I had four kids still at home and it was devastating, to say the least, that here I gave up my career for what I thought was going to be wonderful, but now I was stuck with. Now what do I do for kids?

Speaker 2:

I started putting out my resumes and actually interviewed for a job in the city of Goodyear for their Parks and Recreation director.

Speaker 2:

They had 600 applications for that job and I was number two and I didn't get a couple other jobs. I ended up working just as a financial consultant, but that got to a point where we weren't making ends meet and it was very difficult going from a decent salary position back to entry level. So we decided that maybe Charlotte, for the first time in our married life, would actually go out in the workforce and get a job. And it was a difficult thing for her to swallow and For me to swallow because I had been the provider and now I'm not providing Quite the way that I had been. I took a little hit on that and it was a difficult time In our families, definitely several steps back with what I had been doing, what my career goals were, and then the economy continued to be bad. So I'd probably been there maybe a year and a half and I got let go of that job. So that was just another devastation. Like I can't even keep an entry level position.

Speaker 1:

Oh.

Speaker 2:

It was a devastating blow. There's a lot more little intricate stories that kind of took the the knife and twisted a little bit and just made a little bit More painful.

Speaker 2:

Yeah so here I was back to to square one again, with four kids still at home. Our oldest was just graduating high school and then I had our three younger boys. Just devastating times where I thought we have gone backwards so far. And now I'm back without anything. Yeah, I was serving as a bishop in our church, in our ward, so I'm every week I'm helping people with welfare issues for themselves and in the back of my mind I'm thinking I need someone to be helping me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, right now with some welfare issues, because we're really struggling right now and it was really a difficult time spiritually because I'm sitting here thinking I'm doing what I think is right in my life for my family and I keep getting these huge blows. It's not just we're gonna back you off and cut your salary or something. No, we're just letting you go and good luck to you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah so there were many times I just thought what's in store? What does God have up his sleeve for me? Because I did have faith. We had faith that I Think we're gonna get taken care of. But when you're going through it, that faith gets.

Speaker 2:

It gets a little murky right so you don't know what the Lord has in store for you and you're walking by faith, expecting that the Lord will take care of you. Sometimes he pushes you. You think that you can't get pushed any further, and then you keep getting pushed further. Yeah, and it really tries your faith. I'm doing everything that I should be doing. I feel like I'm a good person. I'm trying to be a good person.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I'm trying to provide for my family and it's just not working out. And it's blow after blow after blow.

Speaker 3:

And it was at that time when we weren't employed. Because of that, we weren't insured. And the strangest thing happened someone came to our door selling catastrophic insurance. Someone just knocked on our door randomly in February of 2012 and none of us were insured, and for some reason, dirt let this guy in, this stranger, and Signed up for this catastrophic insurance that really didn't cover much, but it was high deductible. Two weeks later was when we got the MRI from Sam that diagnosed him with the tumor in his spinal cord.

Speaker 1:

Two weeks later. Two weeks, oh, my word.

Speaker 2:

Just before then I had gone to work with a good friend of mine because he was starting his own medical practice and he's an ophthalmologist and I have no idea what we're doing here. I don't know medical. It's an eye. I knew what a pupil was, but that's about as far as it went. Now he's wanting me to help him, not only in the business side of things but in the office, like helping him work up people, and I thought, well, I don't have anything else going. So I decided let's do that. And I was a little hesitant because we were such good friends. You hear of those instances where people start working together that were friends and became not friends anymore Because they work together. But you're also feeling maybe the Lord is pushing me this direction and I felt good about it. So we did.

Speaker 2:

From that point on it's blossomed into something that's been better than I had ever envisioned and it still is to this day. It still is. How can you get emotional when you're talking about your work? It's just seeing the Lord's hand and recognizing that so many of these difficult steps were necessary for me to get us to get to where we are now. So back to that huge trial in our life when your child diagnosed with cancer. And now you're thinking we're in a position where we can handle this, not only financially, but two weeks ago I got insurance, so that's going to be a huge relief. Well, it did end up being a huge blessing, huge blessing. Now this is supplementary insurance. It's not a full coverage of everything and it did its job for us, cost us quite a bit of money, but it saved us quite a bit of money and the Lord had blessed us to a point where we were able to make it work and I was now making more money than I ever had made.

Speaker 3:

Wow.

Speaker 2:

Which is amazing.

Speaker 1:

I can see why you get emotional. Because I get emotional? Because in the moment when you've lost and lost, and lost and lost, and it just feels like you're getting kicked in the T, you know, and especially when you've left the security that you had in your former job and you've gone out on a limb and you've trusted somebody and it doesn't work out, and then to have it happen again and again, it can start to feel a little bit personal and it can start to feel like are the heavens closed? I'm praying and I'm trying and I don't know what else to do to get the power that I need from heaven. Lord, I need you.

Speaker 1:

We can't see all the different workings, and yet all of that changed you and gave you skills and you learned things that then prepared you for everything that was going to come next in your life. And so I get emotional when I think about that, because that's such a beautiful thing and it just restores our faith in the Lord that he has a plan and in the middle of it we can't see it, and it's so discouraging sometimes, but you see it now and now you can look back and you can celebrate, look what the Lord did for us, and so of course you get emotional, yeah.

Speaker 3:

And it's kind that the Lord, when you're going through those maybe a little bit silent times where you feel like where are you Do you feel a little bit abandoned? And when we were going through our trials with Sam, the Lord always seems to send you tender mercies that maybe don't answer the full question, but let you know that he's thinking about you and that he is aware of your situation and that he is there. And we got a lot, a lot of tender mercies through all of that, so that helped us to keep going.

Speaker 1:

Yes, that's beautiful.

Speaker 2:

So, going back, sam was in ninth grade and playing football, basketball, baseball, and Sam was a good athlete. But he would start getting some very sore arms, like when he'd throw, whether it was baseball, football or whatever. His right arm would just get really sore. You would just shove that off and just say that's just sports, you know, you're just throwing and it'll get stronger. It's fine, that's just the way it is.

Speaker 3:

And when we did go and get his arm X-rayed in, of course there was nothing in his arm to show anything.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, orthopedic surgeons, they're looking at his arm or shoulder. Oh, it looks great. Nothing, no problems. So you're just thinking, well, all right, everything's good. And then you start to see as time goes on, well, your right arm is looking a little smaller than your left arm and your right hand. So that's a little strange. And so one of our friends said why don't you measure his right arm versus his left arm or his right leg versus his left leg? And that was when the first little thing started to creep in our minds, like, well, maybe there's something a little worse, because his right arm was certainly in, his whole right side was smaller than his left side. Oh, my goodness. And those are things that you're like. Oh, still no, this is Sam, it's all right, he just needs to lift more weights on that side or something.

Speaker 2:

So, anyway, we had talked to our radiologist let's do an MRI and let's just make sure that everything's fine. So it comes in, sits us down in his office and has to tell us that our son has a tumor and it's in his spinal cord. It's really strange one that he hasn't seen too much, and I remember the bottom drops out from us and we're like what? So we brought Sam into his office and we told him and just to look at Sam's face, you're wondering what all is going through his mind right now is we're telling him you've got a tumor in your spinal cord. Is he thinking am I going to die? Do I get to play baseball this year, or is this the end of it? Is this where I start dying at this point? And those are the same questions for us. So as we go back and we install starts to settle in, we start talking to neurosurgeons from Barrows that are now in the picture and we start getting plans together for him to go in and have surgery to try to remove this tumor.

Speaker 2:

Then the faith starts coming in, where we're saying we are spiritual, we have great faith. And I know in the scriptures it says you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains. Well, I'm not moving a mountain, I'm just having my son get healed. I've got that faith, without question. We've got that faith. I know Sam has that faith. I know our other kids have that faith. He'll get a blessing, he'll go in for the surgery and this is where we see miracles. He's going to go in there and they're going to say, my goodness, we've never had a surgery go like that.

Speaker 3:

So smooth that tumor, we just popped it right out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you know what he's going to be playing baseball in two weeks and everything's good and that's our expectations. I can say we had that kind of faith. I knew this was going to happen. This is the way it was going to be. So he goes in for surgery. Eight hours later his neurosurgeon comes out and just says wow, that was difficult, I got maybe 10% of the tumor out and we just about lost him. And that's not registering in my mind. You just really lost him during surgery.

Speaker 2:

This was an astrocytoma, which typically is a very aggressive brain tumor, but was in his spinal cord. And here's a neurosurgeon with great experience but not with this type. It's just not normal. We don't know too much about this type of tumor in the spinal cord. So Sam lost his whole right side. He couldn't move his whole right side coming out of surgery.

Speaker 2:

We have to tell his brother, our oldest son, what's going on and in my mind I'm thinking he's serving a mission for our church in Hawaii. He's going to want to come home. He's going to want to leave his mission, come home to support his brother. We called his mission president and we let him know what was going on and his mission president said I'll take care of it, let me talk to him. So he calls up Bo and tells him your brother has a tumor and he's going into surgery. What do you think? And both sat there for a second. He said I need to stay on my mission and my family needs the blessings that I will give them for observing and that, to me, was a huge boost in my faith that here's my son that we raised and he's making this kind of decision. I mean this is a huge decision. And so for us we said, okay, the Lord will not abandon us. Now We've got our son on a mission. We will receive blessings from him serving a mission. Sam's healing has to start. At this point we still didn't know Okay, he still has a tumor and he doesn't have his whole right side. At this point we're thinking, okay, now where that miracle that we were expecting didn't happen, but it's obviously still going to be there. So we start moving forward.

Speaker 2:

I remember the night of his surgery. We lived three hours away. I had to drive home that night because I'm helping this guy with eye surgeries and I had my work. I had to be there first seven o'clock in the morning. I had many of those types of trips in the next eight months.

Speaker 2:

I remember being so anxious the next day because Sam had, yeah, a respirator down his throat after coming out, because he wasn't really breathing on his own, because he'd lost his whole right side. And in our minds we're thinking is this the beginning? Is this the way it's going to be? Is he going to be on a respirator forever? Is he going to be in a wheelchair forever? Is he ever going to recover from this? Will he ever play baseball again? Will he ever play football again? Is all of that over? We didn't know. And I remember calling my wife that next day and she says they just took the respirator out and I just broke down. I just thought that's the answer. He's gonna live. No matter what happens, we're gonna be okay. If we have to push him around on a wheelchair, if we have to do whatever, we'll be okay. He's gonna live and that's just the beginning. So no, it was not a smooth road. From that point, and even though we felt like we had faith, extreme faith things just did not go how we planned.

Speaker 2:

No at all yeah.

Speaker 3:

He was in the hospital for a couple of months and then he got spinal meningitis twice and then he had radiation for six weeks, which he lost a lot of weight and just made him so sick. So basically I moved down to the valley with him while he was going through all of that and Dirk stated in our town to be with our younger son.

Speaker 2:

So we're into this several months now and things are just not moving the way we had hoped and he would start to show signs of improvement. He was doing physical therapy and, yes, he was starting to walk and he was getting that back, but it was just going a lot slower than what we expected or wanted. His doctors weren't giving us any kind of really good hey, you can expect this or this or this. They were just shooting from there. They didn't know too much about it either, and I would not allow myself, we would not allow ourselves to say whatever you think, god, whatever's gonna happen, we will accept whatever you're gonna do. No, because our faith was Sam is gonna be okay, he's gonna be healed.

Speaker 2:

So we would not, I would not allow myself to go there at all. So during one of these times I'm getting ready to go home and he had just had another bout of spinal meningitis, which up until that point I didn't realize how bad that could be. But people die from meningitis. I'm not thinking that for Sam, but I just saw how much he suffered when he got really sick, when he'd start to get a little better, and then it was maybe one baby stepped forward, two huge steps back and it was tiring and I just remember for the first time in my life, I felt aren't you anxious to hear how Dirk felt?

Speaker 1:

I know I was. Dirk felt so many emotions at this moment. His heart was breaking as he poured out his anguish to the Lord. You want to be sure to continue with us to hear part two in this two-part series and for today's takeaways. Dirk felt that he wanted more after working at 17 years as the city parks and recreation director, and he got his MBA and then was offered a job with a friend in a hotel property management and development. However, after only a year and a half he was suddenly let go, with no job to support his young family with four children at home. As the economy took a downturn, he applied for and obtained other employment, but he lost those jobs too and he felt that he had gone so far backwards in his career.

Speaker 1:

Dirk shares how he and his wife managed financially and she went to work to help support the family. Then they were hit with yet another devastating blow when they found out their second oldest son had a rare cancer in a tumor in his spinal cord. This tried their faith and the faith of every member of their family. Stay tuned for part two to hear how the Lord had a plan for them and how the Gardner family grew closer to the Lord through their trials. Thanks for listening. I know you're busy. Did you know that you helped spread the love by leaving your review and following? This helps increase our visibility so people can find us online. I really appreciate your help. I'm wishing you lots of love in your own hero's journey.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Karen Hall

Host