Barbara Phillips heard the word cancer on a Tuesday afternoon in a beige examination room in Virginia Beach. Stage 3 breast cancer. The doctor was still talking — treatment options, timelines, next steps — but Barbara had stopped hearing. The room had shrunk to the size of that single word.
Cancer.
The Diagnosis
The oncologist was thorough and professional. He explained what stage 3 meant: the cancer had spread to nearby lymph nodes but had not yet reached distant organs. There were treatment options. There was a plan. Statistically, the survival rates were better than many people assumed.
Barbara heard none of it. She nodded at the right moments. She took the leaflets. She walked to her car. And then she sat in the parking lot for forty-five minutes, unable to turn the key.
The Fear
What followed was two weeks of the most suffocating terror Barbara had ever experienced. She could not eat — food tasted like cardboard and her stomach rejected everything. She could not sleep — every time she closed her eyes, the word terminal played on a loop. She lost nine pounds in fourteen days. Not from the cancer. From the fear.
Her husband found her at three in the morning sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at nothing. Her daughter called every day and Barbara could not pick up the phone because she did not want her children to hear the shake in her voice.
The fear was not rational. She knew that. Her oncologist had not said terminal. He had not said hopeless. He had said treatable. But fear does not listen to statistics. Fear is its own kind of cancer — it metastasises into every thought, every moment, every breath.
"I was not afraid of dying," Barbara said later. "I was afraid of the suffering. I was afraid of the chemo. I was afraid of being a burden. I was afraid of my husband watching me waste away. The fear had more faces than I could count."
The Encounter
On a Wednesday evening, two weeks after the diagnosis, Barbara's friend drove her to their church's midweek prayer service. Barbara did not want to go. She did not want to see people. She did not want to be prayed for, pitied, or told that everything would be fine.
But she went.
The service was small — maybe thirty people in a room that held two hundred. The worship was quiet. Someone read from Isaiah 41: "Do not fear, for I am with you." Barbara had heard that verse a thousand times. It had never meant anything to her like it did that night.
During the prayer time, three women from the congregation gathered around Barbara. They did not give speeches. They did not quote statistics. They put their hands on her shoulders and they prayed quietly, gently, persistently.
And something happened.
Barbara described it as a physical sensation — like a weight being lifted from her chest. Not the tumour. The terror. It was as if someone had reached into the place where the fear lived and pulled it out by the root. One moment it was there — suffocating, crushing, inescapable. The next moment it was gone.
"I cannot explain it in medical terms," she said. "I just know that when I walked into that church I was drowning in fear, and when I walked out I was not. The cancer was still there. But the fear was not."
The Healing
Barbara began chemotherapy the following week. She went into the first session with a peace that baffled her medical team. Her oncology nurse asked her what had changed — just two weeks earlier, Barbara had been visibly terrified at every appointment. Now she was calm. Not pretending. Actually calm.
The treatment was hard. The chemo made her sick. She lost her hair. There were days when her body felt like it was betraying her. But the fear never came back. Not once.
Six months later, her scans came back clear. The cancer had responded to treatment. Her oncologist was pleased. Barbara was grateful — but she will tell you that the greater miracle was not the clear scan. It was the Wednesday night when the fear left.
What This Means for You
If you are reading this and you are terrified — if the diagnosis has stolen your sleep, your appetite, your ability to function — hear this: the fear is not permanent. It feels permanent. It feels like it will never leave. But it is a liar.
God does not always remove the cancer instantly. Sometimes the treatment is long and hard and brutal. But He can remove the fear right now. Tonight. In a prayer service or a hospital room or a kitchen floor at three in the morning.
Barbara Phillips went into surgery with a peace she could not explain. Not because the cancer was gone — it was not gone yet. But because the One who held her was bigger than the thing that was trying to destroy her.
You do not have to fight the cancer and the fear at the same time. Let God take the fear. He is good at it.
