The crazy making process of waiting for test results.

It’s amazing how much I was catastrophizing things when I visited my doctor this week to learn the results of my CEA and CT scan. This would be the one year mark since my last chemo treatment, and my doctor told me that if colon cancer returns then in 90% of the cases it will happen within the first year from the last treatment. So, I was nervous, and had a bad feeling about what I would soon learn. The moment I arrived at my Oncologist I noticed that things were different. The nurses and staff seemed more serious than usual. None of them asked about our new Dalmatian puppy, as they had in the past, and it seemed that a few of them gave me sympathetic looks, as if they knew something that I didn’t. I was brought to a treatment room and told to wait, and as the minutes ticked by I noticed other strange things. The nurse hadn’t stopped by to check my blood pressure. She always had checked it before, and had checked to see if I had changed any medications, but this time she just rushed by the open door of my treatment room, glancing in and then rushing on. Everyone seemed to be avoiding me. Even my Oncologist. In the past he had always given me a friendly wave and told me he would be right with me. This time he gave me a concerned look as he rushed by the door. This went on for 45 minutes, with nurses and doctors rushing by, but none of them stopping to acknowledge that I was there. I was now 100% certain that the first words out of my doctors mouth would be, “The cancer has returned.” I knew this with a certainty, and now I knew why there was such a delay in seeing the doctor. They were scheduling my admission to the hospital, and contacting my surgeon to see when he had an availability for surgery. I thought about the projects that I would now have to put on hold. I had just picked up a new client for my advertising agency, and would now have to resign that account. I was also in the middle of building a high-performance computer for the graphics side of my business, and I would now have to abandon that effort. Also, I was scheduled to sign the papers for the re-fi on my house. I had no interest in moving ahead with that. Not when my entire world was falling apart. Then, suddenly he was there. My oncologist swept into the treatment room holding a thick file bulging with my medical reports and when he sat down I blurted out my question. “The cancer has returned, hasn’t it?” He gave me a look like I was crazy and said, “No, everything is fine." And as we went over my CT scan results I learned that everything really was fine, and my CEA level was 2.0 and so that was fine, too. So, I wish I could say that I have faced the challenges of cancer with a brave, positive outlook, but that wouldn’t be the truth. Ever since they found a tumor in my ascending colon the size of an orange, one of the largest the surgeon has ever seen, I have been dreading the return of this evil cancer, but it hasn’t returned, so far. In spite of my negativity, I keep recovering. I keep getting better. The effects of the chemo are gone. My business is recovering. I'm jogging again. And except for the time spent waiting for the results of CEA and CT cans, I'm enjoying life. So, if any of you out there are feeling a little rattled by this whole process, this whole nasty encounter with cancer, then I can identify. Nothing about cancer is easy, in my opinion, and even though I haven’t been spending a lot of time in the group lately, I wanted to share my good news with all of you to let you know that even a negative person like me can have a positive outcome.