waiting game

One second feels like one thousand when you are waiting for results. You fill your days with activity to make the time go faster, but do you really want to hear what comes after? The “what if” permeates every breath you take, no matter how hard you try to ignore it. The thoughts keep coming, changing you and how you perceive life, even before you know anything at all. You picture your life with cancer, and what that means to you. How would you handle it? What kind of cancer patient would you be? Would you want to roll over and die? Would you be a poster child for awareness and support?

You wonder what it will mean for your family. How it will affect them. And then you start to wonder how others will treat you. I don’t know why that matters so much- how others treat and look at you pre and post diagnosis- but it does, a lot.

Then you start to wonder what’s wrong with you. Why are you blowing it out of proportion? Are you this sad little attention seeking, over-exaggerating person? It’s probably just nothing. Can’t you just be patient and wait?

I wonder how other people deal with the calm before the storm. Do they find peace through prayer and mediate? Do they reflect on their path in life and current life choices? Me, I just get cranky and bite people’s head’s off.

I had my biopsies on Thursday and was told I would hear back by Tuesday. They had to send the samples to Seattle for pathology. I managed to stay busy all day Friday with my regular work. I didn’t know what to do at my lifting class on Friday evening as I was told not to lift my arms over my head. Try teaching a lifting class without lifting the bar, it’s a lot harder than you think. I also didn’t know what to tell my students, and what they would ask.

I tried teaching the class with a non-weighted bar for the above the head portions. I think I told my students I had an injury so was modifying but that they should use regular weight on the bar. I had one student in the back use the demo bar, and at one point I could see them laughing and throwing the bar into the air and catching it on the clean and presses. I was like come on, use weight! They were totally taking the mick as I usually lift heavy.

I started considering why I was so embarrassed to tell people what I was going through. It’s the boobs, I realized! If I told the class I had a knee biopsy they’d be like oh, okay, and move on. But what if I told them about my boobs? Awkward silence? No one wants to talk about their private body parts in public.

By the time we got to the chest track I was done. I was modifying pushups on my knees and the class was still laughing and going easy. So I shouted out “Okay, so I got my boobs biopsied! What’s your reason for modifying today?” And then I got that awkward look. And silence. Not just from the one poor male student who was probably thinking WAY TMI, what am I doing here #%$???, but from everyone else as well. After class, a rather astute student approached me to inform me that all I really had to say to get them to leave me alone was that I had a “medical procedure”. Um Oh. Maybe that would have been best.

So I filled the weekend with busyness, going to dinner, sleepovers for the kiddo, lots of gym/training. I think we even went to the movies one night. By Sunday evening, I was tired from trying to stay busy. Exhausted from trying to be brave or not brave, from reacting or overreacting, from thinking or pretending not to think.

I spent the weekend not telling but wanting to tell my dd what I was going through. We talk about everything, but I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to scare her or tell her something that would cause her worry, or fear, or change. I kind of wanted to tell her so she wouldn’t give me such a hard time over the weekend, with her lack of sleep/cranky teenager ways, but that wasn’t fair to her either.

So went the weekend. My boobs were, bruised, painful, and sore. I figured I would have healed by now and was tired of hurting from a procedure that was ‘really not a big deal’. They made the recovery sound simple- like you can go about your normal business after 48 hours, but I was still swollen and irritated, and bruised.

So sitting in an auto parts parking lot that night I cried. My bf and I had pulled in to get something for one of my dong chas (crap cars). He pulls over, I start crying. And not just crying, but ugly crying. Poor guy. He didn’t even see it coming. (Except for the fact that I was cranky and biting his head off all day.) I’m sure he didn’t know what to think or never figured going to get coolant would make someone cry. I so I ugly cried and he frantically found some take out napkins to help mop it up.

Looking back on that moment, I can see how things played out. So much is bottled up inside that you are trying to ignore or forget, but it seeps out. All weekend I was cranky and irrational and irritable and all the most inopportune times. And scared. No matter what results you are waiting for you are probably always scared to hear results. I was acting all fine on the outside, but was filled with uncertainty within. Sometimes, when people are going through scary crap that you can’t fix or do anything about, is to just let them ugly cry. Don’t bother telling them to be strong and that everything will be okay, because do you really know that everything will be okay? Maybe the best you can do for someone is to forgive them for their inappropriate outbursts, and hold them as they cry.

Then there was Monday, and Tuesday. Super fun, waiting some more. I trained a lot and made it through those days by mindlessly scrolling through FB when I didn’t want to think about my own life, and I was jumpy all day on Tuesday, waiting for the call. The call that didn’t come.

When the call didn’t come by Wednesday, I finally got up the nerve to call. I figured no news was good news, right? But the longer you wait for results like this, you start to hesitate. First, I tried the Imaging Center, where after a long hold was told that their advocate (special room lady, oh yay!) should have called (she didn’t) or my doctor should be calling me with results. So I left a message for the avocate and waited some more. Then I called my doctor and left a message for them. I waited until the end of business day.

The Doctor’s office rang me right before 5 to say that they got my message and then put me on hold. Another long hold. Then they got back to me and apologized profuseley and said the doctor was still waiting to go over the results and would call me by the end of business that day. I thought it was already the end of the day, but they work late on Wednesdays.

At this point I knew something was wrong. And I was beyond annoyed. I was tired of waiting and tired of being put on hold. Having worked in the medical field before I knew what those long holds mean. And the super sweet polite voice change. That was the big giveaway. It means “Oh crap, this isn’t something I want to/am allowed to deal with so I have to wait for the doctor to call them back. It means that the results were in and they REALLY did not want to be the one to relay them. If it meant nothing, the receptionist would have been more than happy to say that your results look normal and if you need a call back, the doctor will be following up with you in the morning. And that super sweet voice? Know, it always means more.

My doctor called me right at 7pm that evening. The two hours in between took 2 years. Waiting for that call ages you. It’s that call, the bad news call, that you can’t do anything to stop and once it comes you know your life will never be the same. I used to think that call correlated to a tragedy/illness/death of a loved one. I never before considered that it could be for myself.

I was diagnosed with two different breast cancers:

Right breast: A 20x16x22mm irregular mass at 1 o’clock. Estrogen Receptor (ER) positive, Progesterone Receptor (PR) positive, Her2+ negative: invasive ductal carcinoma.

• Histological Grade: High
• Tubule Formation: Low
• Nuclear Grade: High
• Miotic Rate: Intermediate

Left breast: A 33x21x36mm irregular mass with angular margins at 4 o’clock. ER positive, PR positive, Her2+ positive: Invasive ductal carcinoma, DCIS (in situ) present.

• Histological Grade: High
• Tubule Formation: Low
• Nuclear Grade: High
• Miotic Rate: Intermediate

And so it began…