When you're a cancer patient, there's a lot of waiting

Posted By SUE HENDLER, Feb 20, 2009

Waiting for godot is the title of a play written by Samuel Beckett. The play is focused on the time that passes as two men await the arrival of someone called Godot. Godot never shows up and the men are left to decide whether they will wait again the following day, as a young boy tells them that the elusive Godot will certainly come then.

I was reminded of Beckett's play this week as I waited for the results of various tests that will determine how my chemotherapy regime is working. Like this play, life with cancer is filled with waiting. Waiting to be seen by doctors. Waiting for treatment. Waiting for pain or discomfort to go away. Waiting for tests. And, especially, waiting for test results.

Those of us with cancer typically undergo a variety of tests. There are blood tests that show how my organs are working and that measure the levels of the tumour markers my cancer cells produce. There are specialized tests, like the Multiple Gated Acquisition Scan (MUGA), that make videos of my heart and demonstrate whether the chemotherapy treatments I'm on are compromising its functioning.

This is one type of imaging; there are three others that I experience pretty regularly.
Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, allows my doctors to see detailed three-dimensional pictures of my spinal cord or other body part(s) of interest. Bone scans demonstrate levels of metabolic activity throughout my skeleton. They give rise to pictures showing the absence or concentration of a radioactive tracer that suggest where my bones are either rebuilding or breaking down. And there are computerized axial tomography, or CT, scans that generate two-dimensional cross-sections often focused on soft tissues and organs, like my lungs and liver.

Most of these tests require the use of specialized equipment and trained personnel. Some also require particular dyes or radioactive isotopes that allow for the collection of different sorts of data based on the staining or absorption rates of these tracer elements. All of these things - equipment, people and tracers - are, or can be, in short supply, so it often takes a while to be scheduled for a given test.

Once a test takes place, the waiting for results starts. While my doctors can access MRI or CT scan images on their computer almost immediately after the pictures have been taken, they usually prefer to wait to contact me until they've received a technical report in which the images are analysed and compared with earlier tests.

I have found that I not only wait with bated breath for my own tests results, I also wait for those of my friends who are living with cancer. My friend, Susan, gets a CT scan every three months to gauge the state of her cancer. Then there's Jackie, who gets a colonoscopy every year to assess whether any stray cancer cells were left after her successful colon surgery. A new friend, Chris in Ottawa, has breast cancer that has metastasized to her lungs, and she recently had a CT scan as part of her ongoing treatment.

While my oncologists say they don't treat numbers or images, the tests are still an important part of my living with cancer, as they will be used in conjunction with how I look and how I'm feeling in order to figure out how best to treat my condition. And the same applies to my friends and their tests.

While I wait to hear about my latest tests and any subsequent decisions about my chemotherapy, I play Sudoku, wash dishes and brush my cats. I talk with friends and sort my recycling. I also think more about Beckett's play. There are a lot of interpretations of Waiting for Godot. Is Godot a real person? Is Godot actually supposed to be God? Or is Godot not a person or being at all but, instead, a metaphor for something else entirely? Pleasure? Life? Death? Meaning itself ?

Conversely, or at least on the surface, my waiting for things like test results seems unambiguous. If blood work shows that my tumour marker has gone down, that's good news. If my CT scan suggests that various lesions are bigger, well, that's bad news. There is some truth to this, but, it seems to me, there are even bigger issues at stake. Do I want my life to be summarized as a play called "Waiting for Cancer Tests Results"? If not, then I have to find a way of appreciating the fact that the tests are important but not allow them to take over whatever time I have on this planet.

It's hard to do, but I'd really like a play about my life to have a more interesting title. "A Woman of at Least Some Importance," perhaps (with apologies to Oscar Wilde)?

* Sue Hendler is a former member of the Whig-Standard's Community Editorial Board. She is contributing regular columns on her experiences while she travels her breast cancer journey.