Waiting Is Its Own Cancer

I don’t really know what the worst part of cancer was for my late wife Lois. I never asked her, and I can only guess what her reality was. All I can come up with on my own is the ridiculously obvious: The fact that she died from the disease in 2012, following more than four years of virtually nonstop weekly chemotherapy treatments and a host of other interventions.

I did not have cancer — and don’t now — so I’ve always figured I have nothing to gripe about personally. The worst part of cancer for me? For me?! “Get serious,” my thinking has gone. “I’m still alive. Lois is dead. So who the hell am I to complain about the worst part of cancer, or about anything at all for that matter?”

But I’m learning something all these years later: It turns out that while I did not have cancer, cancer had me. Or should I say it had me too. Which means I do indeed have something to complain about.

What was the worst part of cancer for me? For me?!

It was the waiting. The excruciating, debilitating waiting.

***

I’m not talking about garden-variety waiting; we all have to wait in life (see Department of Motor Vehicles). I’m talking about PET scan days — the days when Lois and I would go in to the Mayo Clinic at 5 or 6 in the morning so that she could have a scan of her entire body, which would reveal whether her cancer was spreading, shrinking, or staying about the same.

Mayo is unique in that you can get the results of PET scans the very same day they’re conducted. Which is a blessing and a curse, because what it means in practical terms is that once the scan is done in the morning, you sit around for six or seven or eight or nine agonizing hours waiting until late afternoon to see your doctor and/or his nurse practitioner, who will then deliver the results to you. Whatever they might be. All before your head hits a pillow later that same night.

Yes, this beats waiting several days for the news. And yes, waiting several days for the news beats this.

I don’t really know how Lois dealt with the daylong wait at Mayo. I never asked her, because I was far too preoccupied trying to deal with it myself, and to appear confident and strong in doing so. I figured if I played it cool, she’d be cool too.

I’m not sure I succeeded. I often believe in my life now that I’m good at hiding how I’m feeling inside. My beautiful wife, Adrianne, lovingly tells me: not so much. So does my sister-in-law Karen (Lois’s sister) and her husband Gary. So does my brother Mike. So does my brother Mark. So does my sister Kathy. So does, well, practically everyone who knows me and is paying attention.

So maybe I looked like a mess to Lois. It wouldn’t be so surprising; I was a mess. A physical and psychological and emotional wreck, because I was frying from the inside out. And I mean that only partially metaphorically. It really did feel like my insides were cooking themselves black, like bacon in a frying pan. I could hear the sizzle and smell the burn and feel the sting of the occasional hot spatter of grease. This was life or death in a 10th-floor waiting room in Rochester, Minnesota — Lois was heading one way or the other, the PET scan would show — and we were waiting to see which one would come calling today. Just writing about it now brings back all the fear, if only at a fraction of the temperature. I’m starting to simmer again.

The mornings weren’t so bad, for morning was when the PET scan itself was conducted. And Lois’s results appointment typically wasn’t until 3 or 4 p.m. So the morning was a safe zone for me. Nothing could get me in the morning.

Or wait: Yes, it could.

Like on the day we were eating breakfast an hour or so after Lois’s scan and we got a phone call that she needed to go back to the PET department — for a couple of “additional scans.” I immediately went through the roof, directly to something is terribly wrong and they need a closer look. Playing it cool all the while, of course.

Later it turned out that some of the original scans had simply been fuzzy (or something) and needed to be redone. False alarm. But alarm just the same, which went into the already bursting bin of evidence convincing me that the old saying about assuming is dead on.

So let me edit myself a bit …

The mornings of Lois’s PET scans were typically a safe zone for me. Typically, nothing got me in the morning. Typically.

But after lunch, as the afternoon unfolded and Lois’s appointment time grew nearer, my anxiety skyrocketed. The only thing I could do to keep it somewhat in check was work through crossword puzzles. Dozens of them, wherever I could find them. In the newspaper I’d brought knowing I’d desperately need it; in newspapers I found in the Mayo lobbies; online if I was out of other options. I just kept doing crosswords, doing crosswords, doing crosswords, doing crosswords, trying to block out how scared I was for Lois, for myself, and especially for our two young kids, Isaac and Katie. To say nothing of Lois’s mom, Marilyn, and Karen and the rest of our families.

My strategy didn’t work for long. So when Lois’s name was inevitably called — over my wishes that it somehow wouldn’t be — and we headed in for her appointment, I was on the reddest form of red alert. I would read “signs” all around me, as though I was on patrol. How did Dr. Markovic and his nurse practitioner, Lisa, look as we walked by their office? Could I catch a glimpse of Lois’s scans on one of their computers? (I knew enough to know that, just like a weather radar on TV, colorful wasn’t good.) How long did it take Lisa or Dr. Markovic to actually come into the consultation room?

Even this: How did Lisa’s footsteps sound as we waited in that room and she walked down the hallway to share the PET scan results with us? I had learned to detect what the verdict would be by reading those footsteps: Quick, bright-sounding footsteps = good results; slow, dispirited-sounding footsteps = bad results. (I was wrong only once; Lois must have had at least two dozen scans in all.)

Anything — a good result especially but even a bad result, any result — beat the waiting. And the waiting was about to end.

***

I’m reliving all of this right now because cancer still has me in some ways. It has sown a few dandelions in my mental lawn, and they’re hard to eradicate.

For the last few days, I’ve been waiting for medical results of my own. Not quite excruciating waiting, not quite debilitating. But difficult, more difficult than it ought to be because of what I went through with Lois. It makes me patrol my own healthcare neighborhood much too vigorously and nervously, bracing for potential surprises that likely will never come — but could. But likely won’t. But could.

For more than 10 years now, a doctor has followed me and my kidneys. Every year or so — if I don’t procrastinate it like I did … well, like I just got done doing since 2014 — I have to pee in a cup and offer up some blood so that the protein level in my urine and the creatinine level in my blood can be measured. Both have been just a little bit high, though stable or even falling a bit, since 2004. If they were to ever go too high, it would be a sign that my kidneys aren’t working right.

I went in for my physical last Wednesday, with my new doctor here in my new (since 2014) city — both of which functioned as ample reasons to procrastinate, by the way. When my doctor asked me if I had any concerns, I wisely (foolishly) told her about my ongoing kidney monitoring, fervently (foolishly) hoping she would blow it off, especially since I am some 70 pounds lighter now than I once was and in the best shape of my adult life thanks to much better eating habits and a set of online workout videos featuring trainers with Australian accents who help Adrianne and I “TORCH!” calories and become “CHISELED!”

The doctor was impressed. She was also unmoved, and she, ahem, strongly suggested that I pee in a cup and offer up some blood. So I did. And she promised me I’d have my answers the next day or, at worst, on Friday. Because I had told her how difficult it has become for me to wait for medical results. And why.

Thursday came. No results. Not so surprising, in my experience, and so once 6 p.m. hit (and I therefore knew that the doctor’s office was closed and they couldn’t call to scare the crap out of me and ruin my life) I was once again in the safe zone.

Until Friday.

I kept waiting for that damn phone to ring, and when it did I went through the stratosphere each time. But there was no call from the doctor. Which you don’t really want anyway, come to think of it, because who you really want to hear from in these situations is not the doctor herself but her nurse — who doesn’t deliver bad news. The doctor herself only calls if it’s bad. Another lesson I learned during Lois’s cancer battle. Make that our cancer battle.

Friday ultimately came and went. No phone call. After 6 I was safe once again, and would be for the entire weekend this time.

Saturday was lovely. Nothing could touch me when the doctor’s office was closed completely. Although it would have helped to get a letter in the mail from the doctor’s office, like I’d been praying for ever so politely. Because they never tell you anything bad via a letter. You get a letter when things turn out normal.

Sunday was pretty good, but I knew Monday was coming. So my anxiety grew throughout the day. Ask Adrianne. And the kids.

Then Monday arrived.

I went on moderate alert starting at 8 a.m., when the doctor’s office opens. To (attempt to) keep my mind off of things, I worked all morning on another, very complex writing project — though the tempting crossword puzzle from Sunday’s New York Times was literally within reach.

At 11 a.m. I couldn’t take it anymore — the writing project, being cooped up at the kitchen table … and the excruciating, debilitating waiting — so I decided to go to the nearby Holiday station for a cup of their semi-tolerable coffee and a protein bar.

As I turned the final corner to pull into the parking lot, I had a premonition that my cell phone would ring.

And then it did.

It was my doctor. Not her nurse!

And she gave me the news, right then and there as I sat in my car in the gas station parking lot. Shaking…

***

My numbers look pretty good, she said.

Then couldn’t your nurse have called? I couldn’t help smart alecking to myself.

One of the numbers is even on the high side of normal, the doctor pointed out — “because age is a factor,” she had to throw in, as I contemplate the idea of turning 50 next April.

Thanks, doc. Like I said: Couldn’t your nurse have called?

The wait was and is (finally) over. And everything’s pretty much OK, just as I kept telling myself it would be for days on end but couldn’t really believe until the days on end had ended.

I used to be unmoved by these types of things. Going to the doctor was routine. Until it wasn’t, first for Lois and then for me.

My kidney issue is nothing compared to what Lois went through. But it has become something, to me, because of what she went through. And what I went through. Cancer got Lois, yes; it killed her. But it got me too; it wounded me and left a few pesky weeds in my life.

I don’t know what to do about them — yet — but since I’ll be an old man soon, let me start here:

Hey you, cancer! Get off my lawn!

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.