Waiting for Results: What to Do... Eat? Pray? Google?

We've all waited—Am I pregnant, is it cancer, will she get in, was he on that plane?

What kind of wait-er are you?

A good friend is in that awful but interesting medical purgatory; the time between the Before the Thing Happened and After the Thing Happened. There's an excellent chance she'll get good news Monday and move on with her life. She'll be relieved, probably let herself feel the full terror of the possibilities for a minute or two, call her husband and then get back to work.

But for now, she's floating in the limbo of Waiting.

Since she's one of the most insightful and articulate human beings I know, and since she shared this with me, I asked, gently, if we could talk about what it feels like during this time when she's calling herself a Patient-in-Waiting. Remarkably, she said yes. "I know you'll make me sound thin," she says.

How do we handle the Waiting?

Everybody of a certain age goes through it. Everybody waits for news about their own life or for the life of someone they love. It's part of the deal you sign onto as a human being. First you find something or sense something, a lump, a difference in the size or shape of something, an odd pain, a weird bloated feeling. Whatever it is, depending on who you are, you either ignore it for two years or two months or two weeks or whatever you can tolerate, or you race to the doctor and demand every test there is.

Maybe you're a person who takes good care of herself and you go for some routine test and something unusual, slightly worrisome emerges on the screen or on the slide.
However you get into the Waiting, somehow you get there.

First maybe you get very practical, ask if you need a ride home or can you drive yourself after the procedure. Sometimes you have to start the pre-Waiting Wait when you know you're facing the test but they can't do it for a few days or a week. My friend had hers done right there, no pre-Waiting Waiting. Just regular Waiting.

Why must we always wait over a weekend?

So we get the test and we wait. One day, two days, four, a week. Over the weekend. "Why is it always over a weekend?" my friend asks. My friend thought it would be a good distraction to talk about the Waiting, rather than the potential outcomes. She says she feels like she has choices within the Waiting.

Read more: The Waiting Mind