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The Story Behind the Picture
“It’s during duck season, and Bill, one of our providers here, called me and said, ‘I need you to come in here and see this patient.’”
So Cates changed course and went to Satellite Med.
Before walking into Room Eight, he did what he had done countless times before. He prayed.
He asked God to allow him to see the patient through God’s eyes.
Cates remembers the stories that unfolded in the rooms of Satellite Med over the years. Ask him about them and he can tell you.
That day, he listened to the patient’s words. He listened to her heart. Then he moved his stethoscope toward her lungs.
“Before I put the stethoscope on the right lung, the Lord resoundingly said to me, ‘They have lung cancer.’”
Cates listened closely and ordered an X-ray.
The next day, the patient sat in Room 16 waiting for the results.
When Cates looked at the X-ray, he was suddenly taken back to another moment in his life, the day he saw his own mother’s X-ray and learned alongside her that she had lung cancer.
That moment had shaken him.
Now, years later, what he saw on the screen in Room 16 shook him again.
“Trying to compose myself, I told her, and she was so shaken,” Cates recalled.
What happened next was about more than medicine.
“All three of us, my scribe, Bill and me, got on our knees and prayed for her,” Cates said. “It was very, very powerful. I asked her if she knew the Lord. She said she did. So I got up and said, ‘We’re just going to pray that God’s going to move fast on this.’”
Things did move fast.
In less than two hours, the patient had an appointment with an oncologist for the end of that week. A CT scan of her chest with contrast was scheduled for the day before the appointment, and blood work at the cancer center was arranged for the following day.
It was still Tuesday morning.
That was Satellite Med functioning the way Cates had designed it to function.
And, for Cates, it was also an example of trying to be the physician he believed God had called him to be.
Then came a message Cates did not want to hear.
Early the next morning, Jan. 29, 2025, Cates awakened.
“At 4:10 in the morning on the 29th, I hear the Lord so sweetly say to me, He said, ‘It’s time.’”
Cates knew what he believed those words meant.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t ever want you to say that. But I’m going to be obedient.’”
He sat on the edge of his bed for about 30 minutes.
“I said, ‘Okay.’”
But his thoughts returned to the patient he had just diagnosed.
“I was pleading with Him related to this patient,” Cates said. “I said, ‘Lord, look how quickly you’ve diagnosed this, and how miraculous you are, and how wonderful you’ve been and continue to be. Why would you do this?’”
Satellite Med's doors would remain open longer after Interstate Health partnered with the practice.
Then came July 1.
The office was moving toward its closing, and Cates knew his time there was coming to an end.
His first patient that morning was waiting in Room 22.
It was her.
The same patient who had sat in Room Eight. The same patient whose X-ray had shaken Cates in Room 16. The same woman Cates and his staff had knelt beside and prayed for.
She had come back with news.
She was in complete remission from Stage 4 lung cancer.
And she had brought Cates a gift.
It was a painting.
As she unwrapped it, Cates saw Satellite Med beneath an extraordinary sky filled with deep blues, orange, gold and light.
Then she told him why she had painted it.
“When I began praying for you all,” she said, “this is what I saw.”
Today, the painting hangs as a picture of Satellite Med.
But for James Cates, the story behind the picture is much bigger than the building it portrays.
