Yesterday, I sat in the waiting room of an imaging office, a few days after the anniversary of my mother’s passing.  A smattering of patients waited, too, while House Hunters blared on the TV and the girls at the desk talked about ordering breakfast.  I wondered if I were the only one creating a narrative of what we are all doing here.  Because at some point, they’re either Looking for Something or Watching Something. 

My mom was fifty when they jumped right to Found Something when she found the lump in her breast that the mammogram didn’t.  This was thirty years ago in my hometown where medical care can be hit or miss. 

When breast cancer month rolls around every October and all the pink attempts to make this ugly disease look both cutesy and noble, I’m reminded how horrendous the experience was for my family.  There was ugliness, fear, and family in-fighting along with the complex psychology of my mother, who did not behave the way cancer patients in commercials and movies do.  It’s twenty-six years since she died, and I still ask myself what the fuck just happened here. 

The four years she lived with cancer were a roller coaster for all of us, given our complicated family dynamics.  Her mental health suffered with the onset of the diagnosis and my siblings and I begged her to stay in treatment when she would say she wasn’t “doing this shit anymore”.  Her psychiatrist seemed disinterested in this youthful 50 year-old mother and nurse whose life was going down the drain, even after she tried to end it.  Her oncologist was not any better.  During one appointment, when I begged him to please do something, he shrugged and said, “she said she doesn’t want to do chemo anymore.”  And that was the extent of it. 

I’ve pulled the threads of this apart off and on in therapy over the years, imagining her feelings about her lot in life at a time when I lacked the emotional maturity to talk to her about it.  In my own life, I developed a deep anxiety about losing someone close to me while not wanting anyone to see how much I worried about it. 

By the time 9/11 happened, a year after she died, I was well versed in rehearsing every trauma that could befall my loved ones.   Seeing the World Trade Center on fire a couple miles away made the fear of the unbelievable more possible.  

I’ve grown to realize that I paper over my fear with jokes about “my number coming up”.  Being a parent now, the fear of losing my child or of myself or my husband not being a part of his life can make my body go cold if I think about it for more than a second. 

So when I had a routine cardiac calcium scoring test done five years ago, these arteries that have tolerated my love of fast food came out clean as a whistle.  But the announcement that they Found Something no one was looking for, is something I’ve mostly lived with without losing my mind. 

Finding a lung nodule, according to Dr. Google, is not really a huge deal.  But I was referred to a pulmonologist and she proceeded to scare the crap out of me.  I listened to her wax poetically about this possibly evolving into cancer, what the treatment options are, and the importance of watching this thing.  I tell myself that’s not where we are at.  Not right now at least.  I nod and smile and let her manage her own anxiety about it.

Every year, I go through the charade of Watching Something.  Waiting for my CT scan, House Hunters is always blaring and the girls at the desk are chit-chatting.  The same tech does my test every year and when smiling Heidi and her cat-eye glasses called my name yesterday, I felt instantly at ease.  She doesn’t seem to remember me from year to year, but we always have a funny conversation.  I slip off my underwire bra and lie down on the thin paper over the cushion.  With my arms over my head, I am slid into the machine and follow the directions to breathe in, hold it, and then breathe normally.

Every time I have a test that could change the trajectory of my life, I note the space between the mundanity of the experience and the gravity of the potential outcome.  Last year, having a mammogram, I tried not to giggle that “Two Hearts” by Phil Collins was playing in the background of the dimmed room with the pretend blue sky over the fluorescent lights.  Something horrendous could be just around the corner and Phil Collins is crooning away like there’s no tomorrow. 

I’m still waiting for the result.  Unlike every other test, this pulmonologist may get a sadistic thrill out of withholding the result from the portal so that she could project her anxiety about lung cancer into you in person. 

Over the years, the nodule has not grown or changed and I have no risk factors for it doing so, except for breathing my mom’s Salems with the car windows sealed up tight for most of my childhood.  This year, I graduated to getting a CT scan every 18 months instead of 12 months, and hopefully the space between seeing Heidi’s cat eye glasses will grow longer if the nodule remains stable. 

What I am growing to accept is that none of us are immune from the scary stuff.  Accepting it doesn’t mean liking it.  I’ve sold myself on the idea that concocting elaborate scenarios about how we’re all gonna die will not prevent the inevitable for any of us.  Especially since the way we or our loved ones go is usually not what we prepared ourselves for, whether that means an unexpected tragedy or a slow-growing dot on an internal organ.  I attempt to practice that reality – a practice that will never be perfect, but real.