I Hate Waiting

There are things in this world worth waiting for. Love. Peace. A nice dinner. These things cause you to step back from your immediate desire, from “instant gratification mode”, and wait. The time might stretch from an hour, to a day, to weeks, to months, to years. Well, the nice dinner shouldn’t take years, but you understand.

I have found results to be the hardest thing to wait for. Whether you’ve taken a test while sitting at a school desk, or interviewed for a job, tried out for a team on a playing field, or even in a doctor’s office, the anxiety is the same. As the time draws near for the scores to be announced, the feet shift, the palms sweat, the heart races. You’ll find yourself checking the website from your laptop, or your phone, or whatever means the sender chooses to use, on a moment by moment basis. Nothing else in the world could possibly be more important than these results.

We understand life goes on. It’s just that it goes on for everyone else, but us.

I’m waiting on results right now. About three weeks ago, on a Saturday, I fell on the first step of a pool. My feet held no traction, just rising from the water directly in front of me. It took me by such surprise, I didn’t even have the wherewithal to curse as I fell. I remember the sound escaping my lips being, Oh! Oh! OH! And then the concrete and my lower left side met with a brutal impact. My husband pulling me from the water is the only thing I have full recollection of for the next half hour. It seemed I ‘woke up’ as he was asking me if I wanted something for the pain. I must have been walking and talking, I just don’t know how.

Fast forward to Monday. My appointment with the doctor results in the (expected) orders for an X-Ray at a local diagnostic center. Done. Two days later the doctor orders an (unexpected) MRI. Done. A few days after that, the diagnostic center wants to re-run the test, to get a better angle on the area in question. Okaaaaay… Done. In the next couple of days I get a call from the doctor’s office. It’s not the anticipated results of the MRI, but instead, a request to go to my local nuclear medical facility and submit to a full body bone scan. The doctor said there’s a spot on my hip that can’t be ‘clearly identified’. 

So, I do a little research. According to an online medical reference, the primary purpose of such a test is to determine if I have bone cancer.

The nurse at my doctor’s office said the results could take a week to ten business days. Gee, anyone ever heard of that time frame before?

Upon calling said hospital, I discover the soonest the test can be performed will be ten days. ARGH! Fine!

The test, now completed, was painless. The tech performing it told me the results would be at my doctor’s in forty-eight hours. Yeah, I called two days later.

Nope. The results are not in my file.

At 3pm, I called the hospital. The woman was kind enough to fax (yes, I said fax) the report to my doctor while I was on the phone with her. Now they have the report, dammit.

The clock ticked by to 4:50pm. The office closes at five, so this is the latest I could call and still reach a human.

A nurse kept me on the phone for five minutes only to come back and tell me, yes, they have the fax, but no, no one has reviewed it yet. But, someone would call me tomorrow.

ARGH!

So, we sit together, dear reader, waiting. Okay, you can just wait for the next post and find out what happened. You know, the whole “life goes on” thing. 

As for me…

I Hate Waiting.

(But you don't have to. All things are done. Read all about the end results here.