I thought I would be past round four of chemotherapy by now, instead I am waiting for a bed to become available at the hospital so I can continue with the treatment that I am committed to continuing but would prefer to skip altogether. I have been doing a lot of waiting over the last couple weeks; waiting to feel better during an intense intestinal upset, waiting for the phone to ring with test results, and now waiting for a hospital bed. Of the three types of waiting, this is the easiest.  I am impatient to be done with treatment, but each day I don’t have to go to the hospital is a holiday that I wish could continue indefinitely.

All was going according to plan on May 12th. I was so happy to go to the Marin Human Race (Yay, fundraisers!) with Sia and our friend Stu. It felt good to walk with my Commonweal buddies and a couple of dog companions in honor of all our friends past and present.  We had a lovely dinner that night and  I was looking forward to a couple of fun days days with Sia before she left for her summer job and I went back to the hospital. My belly started cramping late that night and I didn’t get much sleep. Thank goodness for the resident on call. He convinced me that I probably didn’t have a bowel obstruction, more likely a 24 hour bug.

The 24 hours stretched into three days with little relief. On Monday I had a belly x-ray which showed nothing dangerous and a CT was ordered. Sia flew off that night, not the way we wanted to end the visit, but it made the good time we had even sweeter. I felt too sick to read, or watch, or even listen to anything.  All I could do was wait to feel better again. Finally by Thursday morning the worst passed and I was relieved and able to make it to the CT appointment thanks to another good friend who gave me a ride.

I started feeling much better and a new kind of waiting kicked in. I called the nurse who had advised me through the dregs of my illness and told him I wanted to know my CT results asap. He said sure no problem, he would call me.  He didn’t.   I had to wait a week to find out that the results were OK; no change at the tumor site since my last scans in October. I won’t go into the grisly details, but I got caught in the “Oh yes your scan results are ready, but everyone who is authorized to tell you the results is out of town dilemma”

Waiting to feel better is miserable but simple. Waiting for test results is miserable and complicated. For planned scans I try to set up an appointment a few days afterwards so I won’t have to wait for a phone call, but even that does’t always work.  The wormy thought that the real reason no one would tell me my results was because they were awful burrowed in and out of my consciousness over the weekend and early this week. My out of town oncologist gave one of his nurses permission to read me the report on Wednesday and that was reassuring, but the worm of mistrust is not gone. Maybe she didn’t read me the whole thing. I actually don’t want to read the whole report myself. I’ve come to the point in my treatment travels when I don’t want to know every little thing that may or may not be worrisome. I just want to trust my health care providers to be honest with me. Sometimes they seem to be following protocols that serve neither their interests nor mine.