Pray for Daisy and her family!

Struck Down But Not Destroyed from Reality on Vimeo.

This is Pastor Britt Merick who has a church in California, and here is his story.


A week ago, I felt overjoyed. Our family had suffered through 8 months of cancer. It seemed as though Daisy had beaten it. We had seen God do so much. We were celebrating – Daisy wanted to go to Hawaii, so we did, as a family. She wanted to swing on vines, and we did. She wanted to swim with turtles, and we did. It was the best time of our lives. While we were there, Daisy began to have stomach pains. We thought she had too much shave ice. My wife put a ban on shave ice – who goes to Hawaii and can’t eat shave ice? We thought it was constipation, so we were giving her laxatives and flax oil and she was pooping her little guts out.

Preaching Christ, our Treasure

We got home Friday at 1:30 in the morning and left for LA just over 24 hours later to fly to San Francisco, where I preached on Christ as our greatest treasure. I talked about my daughter’s previous battle with cancer and how Christ became more beautiful in our family because of suffering.

That night, we were heading out to dinner in San Francisco, and we received a call from the friend who was watching our kids. She told us that Daisy’s stomach was hurting her badly, and she didn’t know what to do. Kate and I immediately flew home to be with Daisy, and the next morning, we took her to her doctor. The pediatrician recommended we go to the ER, so we did, and they performed at CAT Scan.

“It’s Back”

When the results came back, the surgeon pulled us into a hallway, and pulled up the image of her CAT scan and there was the tumor. He looked at us and said: “It’s back. And it’s the size of a grapefruit.” The previous tumor she had since birth and it took 5 years to grow to the size of a Nerf football, but this one grew to the size of a grapefruit in weeks.

For some reason, it was so much harder to hear this time than last time. I think it was because we were so convinced this was finished. I had to go back into Daisy’s room and tell her. I had to look into her beautiful eyes and tell her, “Your tumor is back.”

We wept. Kate and I wept uncontrollably on the floor. When we were able to speak, to pray, the first prayer that I prayed was, “Jesus, we still trust You.”

Surgery and Statistics

They took her into surgery on Wednesday morning, and removed one-third of the tumor. The rest is considered inoperable. It’s connected to her stomach and other major organs, and her aorta. They performed the tests and her tumor has favorable histology (responsive to chemotherapy) and is not anaplastic. Her proposed rate of cure is 30-50%. So there is a 50-70% chance that she won’t make it. The chances are she won’t make it.

From brittmerick.com