My Liver Cancer Blog

and waiting, and waiting, and so much waiting. Can my cancer people who know what I’m talking about give me some likes on this one?

There is the waiting to get the weekly bloodwork done (though, to be fair, this wait is normally pretty short). There is the waiting to find out the results of the bloodwork and how that might impact your ability to move on to the next round of chemo. There is the waiting for the nurses to be ready to take you for the chemo infusion — sometimes 20 minutes, sometimes an hour. Where I get treatment, they give you a pager that buzzes when they are ready for you. Yes, like being at a restaurant, but the food’s better (no, not really). Then there is the waiting of getting the chemo itself – 3 or 4 hours.

There is also, I realize, the waiting that I create myself. I could be doing something else — reading a book, answering emails, taking a walk, providing feedback on work my graduate students have submitted — but instead I am staring off into space, thinking about the next chemo day, wishing it would come faster. In other words, I have too many moments where I am not living my life, and instead I’m waiting for a chemo day that might be a week away. It’s not like I’m putting off life until I am well. It is more that the chemo/immunotherapy dominates my thoughts — it’s a center pole, and other things in my life swirl around it. And now that I’ve written this, I realize that it is something I can work on — I can try to make the chemo less of a thing that gives order to almost everything else.

The worst wait we had (which I did not create) was when I spiked a fever and had to go to emergency. When you are on chemo, various kinds of white blood cells decrease, leaving you immunocompromised and more likely to pick up some virus or bacteria. My oncology team has said that if I have a high fever for more than an hour I should go to emergency in case I have developed a serious infection. So off we went one Tuesday night, and waited and waited and waited for many, many procedures as they tried to identify what might be causing the fever — bloodwork, a chest x-ray, abdominal ultrasound, more bloodwork, urinalysis, more bloodwork. We were there for 6 hours, and they were unable to identify the cause of my fever and headache. Thank goodness it all just went away with some Tylenol. One upside of having cancer – they gave us a private room with a stretcher I could lie on. The last thing they want is for a cancer patient to arrive at emergency just a little bit sick and then catch something far worse from one of the other patients. And they did eventually bring us sandwiches when my husband played the cancer card: “She has cancer, and she hasn’t had anything to eat since lunch. Her oncology team told her she needs to eat at regular intervals. This is very bad for her – can’t you do something?” (Had my oncology team ever actually said that?).

I will admit that I really, really hate waiting. My vision of hell is having to stand in line for all eternity while packing boxes (I also really hate moving house).

Our most recent wait was for my medical oncologist, Dr. G. He was running two hours behind, though no one told us this. So we sat in the waiting room (the room where the whole intention is for you to wait) for an hour as it emptied out of other patients, and then sat in his examination room for an hour, not knowing when he might arrive or if, somehow, they had forgotten about us, and everyone had gone home. You do hear stories like that, after all.

When he arrived, he (like the nurse and the resident before him) wanted to ask about the emergency room visit, the fever, the headache. “And has the headache come back?,” he asked. And, snarky me, who is normally able to keep the snark inside my head, said, “Well, I have a headache now, but I think it’s from how long we’ve been waiting.” Silence. I think maybe my husband would have preferred the ground to swallow him up rather than have to sit next to me. Dr. G sat looking at me for a second, sighed, leaned over his knees, and put his head in his hands. Did I feel deep, deep shame in that moment? Yes, yes I did. Because of course Dr. G’s long day had been far worse than mine. I don’t know how many patients he had seen or what news he had to deliver, but Dr. G was weary.

Yes, cancer is waiting. And waiting and waiting and waiting. But I’ll always think of Dr. G’s head in his hands if I find myself again impatient with the waiting that is cancer.