Waiting

The name for a person undergoing medical treatment is a patient. This is well chosen, for most of the time you are waiting and worrying. You wait for a scan to check whether the cancer has returned. Then you wait for a review meeting with the consultant to hear the results of the scan and to decide what the next step in your treatment will be. I had my CT scan last week and I meet the consultant next week. In the time in-between you feel that your life has been paused.

You try and cope with this anxious waiting by only thinking ‘one day at a time’. Or when the stress is particularly bad, you break it down even further and only think - one morning, afternoon, evening and night at a time. The date of the next event in your treatment becomes the objective. You do your best to get there as unscathed as you can. And only then can you allow yourself to think beyond it.

Family and friends ask normal questions like – what are you doing for Easter? And you can’t really answer because that is so far in the future, well beyond your next treatment date. If they ask – why? Do you say that your life could have changed before then because you might have heard that the disease had come back? And Easter would become irrelevant.

The in-between feels like treading water in a stormy sea. You are desperately trying to keep your head above water. You are spluttering and gasping. You are looking from side to side, trying to sight land. The sea sways and foams around you as far as you can see. Your feet and arms keep thrashing. You are in a sort of suspended animation. Time passes slow and fast. Your past and a whole host of possible futures spin before you. You blink and gasp. The sea sways on.

Sleep is often broken and unrefreshing. Sometimes I wake more tired than when I went to bed. The night is filled with exhausting dreams. Before the scan, my dreams were filled with strange episodes in which I would end up being stabbed or bitten. I woke up clutching my wounds. Since the scan, my dreams have been filled with surreal episodes in which family and friends have been haphazardly put together in bizarre circumstances. I wonder if I am working through a jumble of odd memories and characters from my past.

I don’t know what I would do without T. She is my bedrock, my trusty companion on this awful journey. Despite her own stresses, she usually finds a cheerful word or a hug to help me come out from my watery sojourn. I hold her hand and, with a sigh of relief, step onto solid ground for a while.