Playing the Waiting Game

Have you ever had a day, when you knew you were going to get some type of life changing news? That’s me today; waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the life changing news. I have things to do and places to go but I’m afraid if I step away from my phone for one minute I will miss one of the most important phone calls of my life. Well, important in relatively speaking way.

It’s related to the testing I had done last week; a spinal tap of all things. I would seriously never recommend voluntarily going in to get one. Not that anyone voluntarily goes in to get one anyways. It is not the most pleasant thing in the world. However, less pleasant than the actual spinal tap was the post procedure headache I experienced that landed me back at the hospital to get yet another needle stuck in my back. It was the kind of headache that not even my stash of Vicodin (which my doctor had given me a few months back for some back pain) could fix. Uh huh.

Anyways, the ironic part of it all is that while I was laying flat on my back with some of the most excruciating pain of my life, I had a lot of time to think about the test results but was in too much pain to care. So maybe in some way this was a good- albeit painful – way to distract me from the potential results.

Now that it is day 5 post spinal tap and my headache is finally completely gone, I am back to thinking about it all. Being anxious about anything is pointless. After all, as my friend Linda has pointed out to me, the results of the testing will be the same results whether or not I am anxious over it. Something like that. The point is that it is what it is; and anxious or not, the results will be the same either way. It doesn’t do any good to let anxiety get the best of me.

I had some similar anxiety seven years ago, when I went in for a routine physical and my doctor asked me if I did my self-exams and, not wanting to sound like the sometimes non-compliant patient I am, I lied and said yes.

“So,” she said, grabbing my hand, “Is this lump normal?”

For the three weeks or so it took me to get in for a mammogram, and then see a surgeon, and then get a biopsy done, my life hung in limbo. Did I or didn’t I have cancer?  The first thing a nurse from the hospital told me was to not surf the internet. She said I would just become more anxious about it.  Of course, I didn’t listen to her, and I surfed the net. Boy, she was right. For that short period of time, I was so anxious I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything, really. I was certain that I was dying of cancer.

I ended up not having breast cancer, something that obviously came as a great relief.

But, if I had been diagnosed with cancer, I guess I would have just tackled the disease head on, and being anxious about anything wouldn’t have solved anything, nor would have it cured my disease.

Just like the disease I might have now, I guess.

So I suppose I will go about my day as normally as I possibly can, and when I get those results, I’ll just have to figure out my next course of action in life.

Wish me luck.