Waiting for cancer – you don’t yet have all the information from your body, from tests, from the doctor – you are scared. The medical system is so crowded, so time-crunched, so expensive and so impersonal these days that it is hard to feel that you are being cared for and cared about when you are waiting for medical information. You spend hours, days, weeks waiting for news and dreading what it might be. The waiting is really hard because there is little that you can control. So you wait. Often.

The first waiting comes when you first have a glimmer that something could be wrong. This may come from feeling badly or noticing something out of the ordinary with your body. Or from having a routine office visit and lab test that comes back with an out-of-range result. Any unusual results can lead to another set of exams or lab tests. Each of those tests needs to be scheduled, completed, and the results need to get to your doctor for evaluation and then communicated to you. The period of time between test and result often seems to last forever and be filled with fear, dread and big anxiety. So you wait.

Read More

Cancer changes everything. At the moment of cancer diagnosis, there is a marker in life, which bookmarks personal time as either Before Cancer or After Cancer.

But before that, there is the in-between time, when you don’t quite know what is happening. You may have experienced troubling symptoms for some time, followed by lab work or medical exams. Or, it may have all started with a routine trip to the doctor – you were told that something seems suspicious or wrong. “How long has this lump been there?” After that, you may have gone through more visits and more tests, several weeks apart.

Read More