On Scanxiety

I have scans tomorrow morning. They are “routine,” a regular feature of the territory in Cancerland. These hulking clanking machines, these sound tunnels and sliding beds, making images of my insides with magnetic field & radio waves, with x-rays, with contrast dyes. 

I messaged a friend who has breast cancer the other day about the things cancer patients put their bodies through in order to stay here and hang out with all y’all cool people. The needles, the time spent in tubes getting pictures of one’s guts or brains made, the ports and drains, the insanely priced pharmaceuticals, the side effects. The stigma, especially with lung cancer. But it beats the other option.

When I first started having scans after starting regular treatment, I always got terribly anxious the day before. What if the treatment had stopped working? What if the machines found more disease, more tumors, more spots? What would I do then? 

Well, then the machines found spots. The cancer had outsmarted the inhibitor. So we tried a new inhibitor, and that worked for several rounds of scans. I was so elated the first time I heard No Evidence of Disease. But of course things didn’t stay that way. More spots appeared. We did infusion chemo and radiation, and went back to the inhibitor, which has held me for about a year now.

I guess what I mean to say, is that I still get scanxiety. And because my disease is metastatic, the reality is that it will probably return at some point. I’d like to focus on the “probably” in that sentence, because that gives us some wiggle room. Probably isn’t definitely. Still, the likelihood is pretty good that at some point something will show up on the scans. What that point in time is remains unknown. 

So, perhaps it’s not the prospect of the scans that produces anxiety, but rather the specter those scans raise of the unknown, of having to move from one way of thinking about the world and one’s health to another. The prospect of the sudden pivot.

The good thing is that at this point, we’re not out of options if something does show up. Still, I’d rather we didn’t have to discuss them this time around.

I’ve taken up a mantra to help steady my psyche while I’m in the scan tube. It’s from a 14th Century Mystic, a nun who lived in isolation for a long time and who eventually became an abbess. In the book of “showings” or Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich shares the wisdom she found in holy visions she had and in the voices she heard comforting her in a time of illness and distress. She believed in God’s assurance that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” 

She also, reportedly, liked cats, as shown in the picture above. 

I like to think of Mother Julian’s words writ large on the cosmos. No matter what happens with my scans.

And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.