Zander's Inside Voice

We finally reached an off-ramp in my wife’s mammogram journey. Whew!!

As I wrote about here, the same day that my wife learned that her grandmother passed away, she also got a call that they saw something on her mammogram and wanted to take another look. It was stressful, but ended up pushed to the back of our minds until Monday, when she had the diagnostic mammogram.

Naturally, the tech can’t tell you anything so you are left to your own devices to imagine what the worst case scenario is. As someone who has already won one breast cancer battle, all of this was extremely triggering and very upsetting. Somehow I was way calm. I also chalk it up to military training. It’s like my brain can go into crisis mode and it calms right down. Or maybe it’s because of ADHD. I don’t know. Either way, I was calm the whole time. That allowed me to just relax and take care of her with no fear of what the future might hold.

Yesterday morning she got the results. There was something there, possibly a bit smaller than the original image, but they wanted to schedule her for an ultrasound. Ugh. At least she was able to schedule it for yesterday afternoon. So we went there yesterday and it was fairly quick. But then the tech said it could be 3-5 days for results, but it was usually much faster than that. 3-5 days is way too long when you are freaking out about something. That’s terrible.

Today she got the call that it’s just a cyst. What a relief! It felt like the last few days dragged on waiting for the appointments and the phone call results. I am just glad we can stop worrying about this for now.

But what I have realized about this whole situation is that it is unacceptable that we expect people to wait for days and days sometimes for results. Some places provide them at the same time. Why doesn’t every place have that ability? Why are we subjecting anyone to that level of anxiety? I wish I could invest in a practice that has all the staff all the time to provide instant results. And if you need additional testing, you just move right along to that testing while you are there. No need to wait for results, you just keep going until you know for sure what’s going on. And there would be counselors and oncologists too, to help you get information right away. But you can opt to leave and come back at any time to continue your testing. But I am not rich and don’t have enough money to invest so this is yet another wonderful idea that won’t come to fruition.

I’m just grateful that we get to exist in a place of relief tonight.