In-Between Days

I had a couple of scans last week. Same old same old, didn't choose the music this time and ended up with Il Divo - crumbs that's easy money for them isn't it? I drank the gack manfully (womanfully). I did the banter. Grand.

I tend to enjoy the post-scan pre-results phase. I revel in the unknowing. But it's getting a bit old now. 

Everything is static until I find out what happens next. I write things on the calendar, accepting that none of it may happen because I will be in ICU/in chemo hell/in some new and as yet unfamiliar therapeutic misery. 

The anxiety builds and builds until it peaks, plateaus, dissipates. And then starts again. I often remind patients that a panic attack will always burn itself out, that your body and brain cannot sustain that level of autonomic overactivity forever. But I forget to tell them that as soon as it is gone it can start again.

There are plenty of things to do to distract me. Cleaning, sorting drawers, ignoring the psychological undertones of these obsessional activities. Dancing. Cooking. Shouting at children (again with the subconscious muscling its way into the everyday). 

I am acutely aware now that there are more people involved in this than I had previously considered. The Waiting Contingent include all those for whom my health, or lack of, is equally important. I feel like I am doing them a disservice by making them wait with me. 

As doctors we really have no idea what it might be like for the person on the receiving end of no news. I get results across my desk each morning. I quickly spot the serious ones, the ones with consequences, the ones I need to do something about. I skim over the normal ones, my brain filtering out the good news because it is not "urgent". Not to me it ain't, but oh so urgent to the man woman mother daughter waiting to hear if their world is about to end. Or not. 

It is probably true that no news is good news, because if I am phoning a patient about a result, it is because there is something up, not quite right, I'm sure it will be fine but we just need to do a few more tests. We use language that obscures our real fears and intuition, not out of badness but because sometimes our instincts, or our fancy diagnostic tests, are simply wrong. Not often, but enough to make it unwise to speak in absolutes. 

So the waiting is inevitable, and tough. 

But like the panic attack, it will always come to an end.

Then there is the next bit.