The Waiting Place

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Oh, The Places You'll Go - Dr. Seuss

I sit in The Waiting Place as I type this post. Not a figurative one, an actual Waiting Place -- one of the Waitiest, Weightiest Waiting Places of them all.

I sit in the waiting area of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, MD as Dr. Pamela Wright removes my wife Kym's right breast and Dr. Doug Forman begins the process of replacing it with something that cosmetically approximates her breast. 

At this particular Waiting Place moment, I am waiting for the news of whether Dr. Wright finds metastases in Kym's axillary lymph nodes to go with the infiltrating ductal carcinoma and two areas of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) that were found by ultrasound-guided biopsy on September 11th. That little bit of information, determined by frozen section of her sentinel lymph node, will determine whether Dr. Wright will go further with her surgery and resect two of three layers of Kym's axillary lymph nodes and whether Kym will need to add a course of radiation to her planned chemotherapy.

For those of you still trying to decrypt that last paragraph, here is the sum of it:
The love of my life has breast cancer.

My few years of taking care of patients as an obstetrician/gynecologist gave me a sense of what it is like to watch someone hear the word "cancer" for the first time. Once that word enters the room, it sucks the meaning out of all other utterances, making it difficult to process anything else.

For us, the word's impact is a little less dramatic if only for its familiarity. If you have read any of my other posts on how Kym and I met, married, and "made other plans," you will know that cancer has been a central theme in our lives -- especially in Kym's as her current breast cancer completes her carcinoma trifecta that includes Hodgkin's Lymphoma (in 1983) and melanoma in situ (2004). We know the word cancer is a scary word, but it is not all-powerful, nor is it necessarily an absolute death sentence.

So we wait -- she lying on a surgical table in a dreamless, medicated slumber and I in the relative comfort of the waiting area a few hundred feet away.

We have decided that a good therapy for us will be to write about the journey. We know that the story, however it unfolds, will both help us sort out our feelings and will perhaps give others some perspective as they experience a similar walk through the shadowy corridors of uncertainty and angst. Our own journey has been made less anxious by the postings of people like John Halamka and his wife Kathy as he dutifully chronicled her journey through breast cancer over the last year.

This particular Waiting Place wait is almost over; Dr. Wright will soon come out with the news of how Cancery Kym's cancer is. Then we will enjoy another wait for the more definitive pathology report and then the recovery wait and the chemotherapy start wait and many other waits beyond. But we are not focusing on the wait; our minds and hearts are on the moments that fill the waits, those Magical, Meaningful, Matterful moments that make life worth living.