Waiting

It was cold in the hospital waiting room. My summer sweat had dried and stuck to me like that fine layer of Elmer's glue kids love to peel off their hands in elementary school. I was working a landscaping job that summer before my final year of college, and I could still feel the dirt of the flowerbeds I'd been tending under my fingernails. I felt out of place in my grubby tank top and tangled French braid. Somewhere down these immaculate halls, my little sister was lying on a table, unconscious, letting a doctor with brightly colored socks cut into her neck to take a biopsy. What is this life? Am I in a parallel universe? Can we rewind please?

It was nearing the end of August, those languid "dog days” of summer. Just two weeks prior I had gotten engaged to my high school sweetheart, planning a wedding for the summer after college graduation. My sister, about to move in to her freshman dorm, had ecstatically agreed to be my maid of honor, and under the hot summer sun we had sat in the backyard of my parents’ house fantasizing about flowers and dresses and desserts.

In this humid, happy state, my family had slowly realized something was very wrong. All summer, my younger sister hadn't quite seemed herself - slower, fatigued, quiet. Mom had whispered to me in the kitchen that she was worried she might be depressed. We tried to chalk it up to the transition between high school and college. We got her tested for mono just in case, something that had wiped me out for six weeks as a teenager, but the test was negative.

Then she found it.

The lump.

She told us later - much later - that the minute she found it, she knew. We all tried to say it might be a weird infection from her recent travels abroad, or a strange bug bite, or simply a swollen gland that wouldn't go away. So far everyone had tried to reassure us.

"99% of the time it's not cancer," the doctor with colorful socks had said cheerfully, unknowingly giving my sister a permanent aversion to statistics. He added that once, he had found a botfly in a woman’s neck where they had thought there was a cancerous lymph node. They opened her up and the bug started to fly around the operating room, zip zip! It shows you how afraid we were that this news positively cheered us up.

And by us, I mean my parents and me. My sister already knew. Some deep inner knowing had been growing in her for a while, an intimacy with her body that would come to serve her well as she advocated for her future care. But that day of the biopsy was the first test of this knowing, and while we clung to stories of botflies and benign tumors, she was just waiting for her knowing to be confirmed.

Waiting might be the worst part. We waited a month from finding the lump to getting the dreaded diagnosis. Blood was drawn, pictures taken, and finally, this biopsy. Whoever named waiting rooms was right. You wait. You try to read (but you wait), you try to watch TV (but you wait), you try to have a snack (but you wait).

Then the waiting follows you home. The biopsy had to go to pathology, where someone smart would peer through a microscope and look for the tiny squiggles that would ruin our lives. This could take one to two days. So the waiting gets in the car with you and rides home, where it gets comfy on the couch while you try to watch a movie and have ice cream for dinner - anything to cheer yourselves up.

Then the waiting infiltrates the air around your phone. It must be turned up to its maximum volume and it must be within reach at all times. This is vital, the most important thing in your life at this moment. Must. Get. The call.

But then it comes. And your world flips inside out and you wish you could go back to the waiting. Waiting was a tease, but at least there was a wisp of hope.

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My sister and I agreed throughout her cancer journey that the unknown is scarier than the known. In general, we felt more at peace when we had a name for the issue at hand and a plan to treat it. However, I’ve found that now that my sister is a survivor, I actually prefer to know less - for example, if I know she has a scan coming up, I’ll stress about it until I hear the results. But if she doesn’t tell me her scan schedule, I can continue in blissful oblivion until she delivers the news, good or bad. What works and doesn’t work for you and your sibling? Let’s discuss in the comments.