Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Autumn 2013 | Page 35

He replied, “I had to scrub the bathroom at the Rescue House one
day for my chores, and it was stinking something awful. One of the
boys can’t control himself after life on the street and makes a mess
every time. Well, as I was mopping it up, I realized that my sin was
like that mess, and it smelled just as bad to God. Kneeling on the wet
tile, I promised God I would never go back to the street.”

In February 2013, Michael Cates ’03 beat his previous year’s time running
in the Austin Marathon—this victory after his being diagnosed and freed
from stage 4 cancer. “Our lives, inside and out, have been transformed by
Jesus,” says Bethany Crabtree Cates ’03.

Michael Cates ’03

The fact that he’s alive gives Bethany Crabtree Cates ’03
reason to be thankful every day.
by Dawn Kotapish ’92

W

hen a team of doctors asked him to turn off the Cubs’ opening
game on television in his hospital room, Michael Cates ’03 knew he had
more than a bad case of pancreatitis, or, for that matter, gastritis or acute
food poisoning—the other misdiagnoses he’d received in recent months.
Tragically, the verdict this time was stage 4 diffuse large B-cell
lymphoma, with the disease presenting as an array of cancerous
constellations throughout his lungs, stomach, spleen, pancreas, and
large and small intestines. At his sternum hovered a malignancy the
size of a grapefruit.
For Michael, even worse than hearing the news was having to break
it to his wife, Bethany Crabtree Cates ’03, mother to two-year-old
Eleanor and four months pregnant with daughter Uli.
Later that day, Bethany arrived at Northwestern Memorial Hospital
and entered a darkened room. Michael put his arms around her.
“Everything changed in that moment,” Bethany recalls. “This
unprecedented darkness settled into our lives. I couldn’t do anything
without crying. His funeral was so clear to me—who would be there
and what they’d say.”
But in spite of the cancer’s advanced reach, the Cateses’ medical
team stressed that Michael’s prognosis was nevertheless hopeful. In
his favor was a hardy family history, his youthful 31 years, and even,
counter-intuitively, the disease’s aggression.
Also in Michael’s favor was his top-flight health. Ironically, even while
his body (unbeknownst to him) had been under siege, Michael had just
completed his first-ever marathon. Held two months earlier in Austin,
Texas, the marathon had been sponsored by the Livestrong Foundation,
which works to improve the lives of people affected by cancer.
After the diagnosis in April 2012, Michael took a leave of absence
from his MBA studies at the University of Chicago’s Booth School
of Business and began the first of six chemotherapy sessions.
Mercifully, the intense stomach pain he’d been experiencing subsided
immediately, and he returned to a normal weight. But then the night
sweats returned, and he asked a friend from the ministry Journey61 to
pray for him.

Immediately after that, the night sweats disappeared and so did
Michael’s anxiety. “I really felt God telling me, ‘Let it go, give this to
me, this is not your burden to bear.’”
After the fourth chemo session, Michael called Bethany to share two
miraculous words: “Dead negative.” On June 29, just three months
after his diagnosis, tests showed Michael’s body to be officially cancerfree.
In February 2013, Michael and B ][