Scanxiety and the Space Between Results

There's a word for this. Of course there's a word for this — the internet has a word for everything, and it turns out thousands of people before me have sat in the same waiting room, staring at the same portal, refreshing the same app that will not, no matter how many times I tap it, load results any faster.

Scanxiety.

It's the anxiety that shows up in the gap between the scan and the results. Not during the scan itself — the scan is easy. You lie still, you don't breathe when the machine tells you not to breathe, you let the contrast dye make your whole body feel warm in a way that's somehow both unsettling and kind of pleasant. The scan is thirty minutes of not having to make any decisions at all.

It's the after that gets you.

The waiting is its own diagnosis.

In software, when something breaks in production, you don't get to sit with the uncertainty. You pull the logs. You trace the error. Within minutes, sometimes seconds, you know what's wrong, and you know it because you went and looked. The system tells you the truth as fast as you're willing to ask it.

Bodies don't work that way. My body could be telling the truth right now — could be quietly, cellularly, announcing something — and I won't know it for four more days, because that's how long it takes a radiologist to read the images, write the report, and route it to my oncologist, who then has to find time in her schedule to call me, or more likely, release it to the portal where I will read it alone, at my kitchen table, before anyone has explained a single word of it to me.

Four days. That's not a long time in most contexts. It is an extremely long time when you are waiting to find out if you get to keep being a person with a future.

What scanxiety actually feels like

It's not constant dread. I wish it were that simple — dread I could name and manage. It's stranger than that. It's forgetting, for whole stretches of an afternoon, that I'm waiting on anything at all, and then remembering all at once, like stepping in a hole I didn't see. It's snapping at my spouse over something that has nothing to do with scans. It's being unable to make even small decisions — what to make for dinner, which email to answer first — because some part of my brain has decided that all its processing power should be reserved for one unresolved question.

It's also, if I'm honest, a kind of magical thinking I'm not proud of. If I'm good — if I pray enough, if I eat right, if I don't complain too much — maybe the scan will come back clean. I know that's not how any of this works. I know God is not a vending machine and cancer cells don't care about my attitude. But scanxiety doesn't care what I know. It runs on its own logic, and its logic is fear wearing the costume of control.

The thing about waiting for a verdict

Here's what I keep coming back to. In every version of my life before this one, waiting meant something was about to happen — waiting for a job offer, waiting for a baby, waiting for a flight to board. The waiting had a direction. It pointed forward.

This waiting doesn't point anywhere. It just sits there, holding two futures at once, refusing to collapse into one until the report says so. I am, for four days at a time, simultaneously the woman whose scan is clear and the woman whose scan is not, and I have to live my actual life — make my kids' lunches, answer client emails, fold the laundry — inside both of those women at the same time.

I don't have a tidy way to resolve that. I don't think it resolves. I think you just get better, treatment by treatment, at carrying two futures without dropping either one.

What helps, a little

Not much helps completely, but some things help a little:

Telling someone the scan happened, so I'm not carrying the waiting alone. Naming it out loud — "I have scanxiety today" — takes some of its power away, the way naming most fears does. Not scheduling anything important during the waiting window, because I already know I won't be at my best. And this one surprised me: cleaning something. One small, contained task with a clear beginning and end, something I can control completely when nothing else is controllable at all.

And prayer that isn't asking for a specific outcome, because I've learned I can't pray "let it be clear" with any honesty — I don't actually know that's what's best, and some days that terrifies me more than the cancer does. So instead I pray to be able to receive whatever the report says without it breaking me. That one, God seems willing to answer.

Four more days

I'm in it right now, actually. Scan was Tuesday. Results Thursday, if the portal doesn't beat my oncologist to the punch, which it usually does.

If you're waiting on something too — a scan, a biopsy, a call back you know is coming and dread — I see you in it. The waiting is real. It counts as its own kind of hard, separate from whatever the answer turns out to be. You don't have to pretend you're fine just because nothing has technically happened yet.

I'll let you know what mine says.

💜 Kayla