How do people living with cancer cope with ‘scanxiety’?

Today I will make my way to Cannock Hospital for my three-monthly CT scan. I know the drill. I will sign in at the reception desk, quoting my NHS number (I know it by heart), then make my way to a waiting area which is served by a television with no sound though someone has helpfully programmed subtitles. I’ll glance surreptitiously at my fellow patients, guessing the stage of treatment they’re at by the state of their hair – a full head for the newbie, the presence of wigs or cancer caps for those midway through their chemo or in my case, a sprinkling of new growth signalling the end of the most brutal treatment. I’ll then be instructed by a young health assistant who’s managing a fast-lengthening queue to slip into a hospital gown and remove any metal.

After I’ve changed, she will summon me to a clean bright room with the giant doughnut-shaped scanner where the secrets of my impervious body will be revealed. With great tenderness, the young radiologist inserts a line and warns me that the presence of dye that will be injected into me will make me feel like I want to wee. We both laugh a little awkwardly at the reference. She leaves the room ready for me to be received by the scanner which seems to fire up for take-off like a small plane. Over the noise, a mechanical automated voice demands I take in a breath and then – “breeeaaaathe now”.

Challenging 

This brief and mostly pleasant procedure will be followed by a more challenging two weeks waiting for the results which will be relayed by my oncologist for a date he scheduled before I had my scan.

Some people living with cancer call the feeling that arises at this time as ‘scanxiety’. I call this period the waiting room, the space somewhere between ‘got cancer’ and ‘cancer is in remission’, a kind of earthly purgatory. The thing about being in a waiting room is that you’re operating to someone else’s timetable, and he who controls the timetable has the power, calls the shots. I am made passive somehow by obsessive contemplation of the results.  I seem not to be able to move.

A line from the Charles Bukowski poem, The Laughing Heart, comes to mind:

‘you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes’

The waiting room has become a kind of ‘death in life’ – one of my choosing.

So, this time, I plan to break out of the waiting room. The sun is shining, the nights are lighter, there’s a whiff of spring (my favourite season) about the day.  I have a new recipe to try out, a puppy to walk. There’s a friend I must write to.  And most important, there’s a new episode of The Traitors to enjoy.

The philosopher Alan Watts challenged the journey metaphor for life – the one that created for me the idea of the waiting room where my life is contingent on my scan results. We missed the point about life, he said, “it was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

This time there will be no more waiting. There will be dancing.