I allowed scan-xiety to get the better of me.
Most cancer patients – in news that will surprise absolutely no one – experience some level of scan-xiety. We remind ourselves not to worry. We deep-breathe before our appointments and sweat out the wait for our results. Some of us have nightmares. Some don’t sleep well for days before their scans. We bargain with ourselves and our gods, hoping against rational thought that our pleas will ensure that this latest scan will be clear.
For a variety of health reasons that are not cancer-related, I have had many scans over the past 20 years and never really worried about them, until that first time, in December, 2023. Since then, I’ve had five or six additional MRIs (and that’s without counting the extra two I got in September). I’ve sort of lost count from the monotonous sameness of the experience, though, if I cared to, I could go back through my electronic record and count the results.
The facts show, without elaboration, that I don’t currently have cancer. My liver resection and chemotherapy eliminated it. So, how did I allow scan-xiety to take over, to control my waking hours, my sleepless nights, my infrequent dreams? I honestly don’t know, though, clearly, I’m not alone in that experience.
Part of me wants to blame my VeryBadCancerTM with its high (70-80%) recurrence rate but that isn’t fair to the many people with more common and more treatable cancers. They, too, experience the gripping anticipatory grief of scan-xiety. We’re a large and growing population of individuals who both hope and dread those quarterly, semi-annual, or annual scans.
Every single time I get an MRI, I analyze the technicians’ behaviors, even knowing that they are not foreshadowing my future. Why, I ask myself, did the tech tell me that they hoped I’d feel better soon? I feel fine. Oh my god. What did they see on the scan? TAKE CARE? Why did they say that? It’s back, isn’t it? They’re wishing me well because they saw another growth.
It’s relentless – the imagined pity, the casual humanity turned to sympathy by my overactive brain. It wasn’t so bad in September. Having just finished chemo, I assumed that the cancer would be, at least temporarily, beaten down. Something about these most recent scans, though, took hold of my psyche, shook me to my essence, encouraged me to dread, instead of hope.
Again, my scans were fine. I’m still hanging in, cancer-free, but it – the scan-xiety – cost me this time in a way that I need to remember. It cost me moments of joy and peaceful nights. It cost me in snapping, anxious words and absences when I should have been present.
I am determined not to pay that high price again but it is so much easier to profess that goal than to apply it. The strategies are all in my scan-xiety avoidance toolkit: yoga, mindful breathing, therapy, exercise. The problem, you see, is that, like most people, I, and so many other cancer survivors, have a lot to lose. The difference between us and the average healthy person is that we have experienced the real possibility of an earlier than expected death. But, to quote Cordelia, “I think I like this little life, this silly little life.”
It isn’t just the pain and discomfort of surgery and chemo and possibly radiation that frightens me. I’ve done that before – well, not the radiation. I know what to expect – even from the radiation, having watched my husband endure it – and I know I can do it again and again, even the vomiting, if I have to. It’s not the words that could be in any of our futures: incurable, inoperable, terminal, palliative.
It’s the pain to be endured by my children, my extended family, my found family and friends – but most horribly AGAIN by my children – that really makes me fear my scans. My (adult) babies are strong and they love each other deeply. I know that, if, through some future scan, I receive my ‘notice to quit’, my children will support each other, will be ‘okay’ but I would give a lot to prevent them from enduring another parental cancer death.
It’s a lot to ask and I’m not sure who, in fact, I would be asking since I’ve been, previously, very clear on my uncomfortable relationship with the possibility of an all-powerful deity who occasionally pops down to help you find your pen but allows a lot of kind, gentle, loving people to die of cancer every year.
With all due respect to your beliefs, please miss me with the “God needs them” and “they were called home” business. I hope those thoughts comfort believers but they offer nothing to me when compared to the idea of my children having to stand by my bed, watching cholangiocarcinoma turn me yellow and poison my blood. I don’t know if God was present in the room when my husband gasped out his last.
I do know, though, that my children were there, at Ken’s beside, and they suffered – and still suffer – from the experience of watching their father die after watching him fight to live. Since none of us know what the future holds for us, I am determined to embrace the lesson that this scan’s anxious moments taught me – I need not die before I’ve finished living.
Much love.
