Waiting for the WaitingPosted on Tue, Aug 23, 2011
The waiting is the hardest part.
Dealing with all of the treatments, I’ve discovered, has two phases: the Decision and the Waiting. The Decision part is nerve-wracking, engaging, scary, but it makes you feel like progress is being made. The Waiting, on the other hand, is long and rudderless. It’s the indescribable agony of the unknown, the monster lurking just out of sight, tension increases day to day… and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Waiting sucks.
It’s Tuesday. My next scans are on Thursday, and we will get the results on Friday. And then we move to the next Decision. The results will tell us how the chemo is working, or not, on the tumor in my right lung. When last we checked on it, it was about the size of a small pea. If I’ve got a freaking watermelon in there now, it’s not working. On the other hand, if it seems smaller, or (apparently they can tell this) if part of it is dying, then we’re on the right track. What happens at that point is the Decision, to keep on Skeezy Uncle Doxorubicin 0r to switch it up to something else, including, possibly, having to go to Newark.
Moving on…
After the Decision, there are a few weeks or months of riding that Decision wave. When we’re on that wave, we feel like we’re kicking cancer’s ass. We’re rockstars, nothing can stop us. We have a plan and we’re doing it. And we’re going to keep on doing it until we have to check in again. When that time starts getting close, we will move into Waiting again. And Waiting, as we’ve covered, sucks.
This has repeated over and over again since the beginning. At first, I felt like the goal-posts were being moved on me, every time I got to the end of where they said I needed to go, there was another problem and another goal put in front of me. Like running the New York City Marathon and being told you have to run back to Brooklyn. I finally got used to this and accepted this as a war, that this is how my life worked now, and will continue to work until I get a clean bill of health for several scans running.
But for now, I have to wait. And, like Mr. Petty keeps reminding us, the waiting is the hardest part.
Categorized as Zip-a-dee-doo-dah