How to Get Through the Wait for Medical Test Results

In 2016 my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She came through the chemotherapy and the radiation, and she is eighty now and doing well, which is the part of the story I usually tell.

The part I tell less often is what happens every year now. She goes for her annual check-up. And for the days around it — the ones before, and then however long the results take — something in the house shifts. She keeps her plans, she cooks, she asks about the children. But I can see that she worries.

She knows the results will most likely come back fine, but that doesn’t make the waiting easier. The anxiety is there anyway. There is no decision to make and nothing that anyone could be doing differently.

If you have had a scan, a callback, a biopsy, a test that came back inconclusive, or simply a yearly appointment that used to be routine and somehow is not anymore, you know the kind of waiting I mean.

Why waiting wears you out

The alarm system inside you is built for action. It exists to get you moving — out of the road, away from the fire, toward the thing that needs doing. It floods you with everything required to act, and it switches off when you have acted.

An envelope that has not arrived yet offers it nothing. There is no action available. So the system fires, finds nothing to do, and fires again. That is the exhaustion people describe after a week of waiting: an alarm running with no off switch in reach.

This is also why the usual advice lands so badly. Try not to think about it. Stay positive. Worrying will not change anything. All true, all useless, because they ask you to end an alarm by deciding to. Nobody can do that. And being unable to do it becomes one more thing to feel bad about, on top of everything else.

Anyone would find this hard. Your body was never designed for an interval like this one.

Vigilance and panic feel identical from the inside

Vigilance is the thing that protects you. Vigilance noticed the change, made the appointment, described the symptom accurately to the doctor, and showed up on the day. Vigilance is finite. It has a task, it completes the task, and then it is finished.

What comes afterward feels the same from the inside, but it behaves completely differently. It rehearses conversations that have not happened. It searches, finds a number, and needs another number ten minutes later. It demands certainty from a situation that does not contain any yet. It exhausts you without protecting you at all.

After sixty the difference matters more, because sometimes the fear is reasonable. Sometimes the result is not fine. So you cannot simply tell yourself that worry is irrational, because it is not always irrational, and you know it.

The useful question, then, is this: has vigilance already done its job? If the appointment is made and the doctor knows what you noticed, then yes. It finished. Everything happening in you now is the other thing, and the other thing has no task to complete.

The late-night searching

Almost everyone does it, and almost everyone feels ashamed of doing it. Looking things up during the wait is your alarm system finding the only action available to it.

The trouble is that the action does not work. Search results hand you statistics drawn from people whose age, history and circumstances are not yours, attached to a condition nobody has said you have. The relief lasts about ten minutes. Then the next search is needed, slightly more frightening than the last.

A limit works better than a ban, because a ban you will break at eleven at night. Give yourself one look, at one reputable source, once. Then close it, and write the question you actually want answered on a piece of paper to take to the appointment. The question is the useful part. Getting it out of your head and onto paper is often the thing that lets you put the phone down.

One very easy thing you can do (takes about ninety seconds)

When the wave arrives — the tight chest, the racing thought, the sudden certainty that something is badly wrong — sit down wherever you are and breathe so that the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. In through the nose for a count of four. Out through the mouth, slowly, for a count of six or seven. Do that for about six or eight rounds.

The length of the exhale is the part that matters. A long, slow out-breath is one of the few signals you can send deliberately to a system that does not otherwise take instructions. It gives the alarm the one piece of information it responds to.

If paying attention to your breathing makes you feel worse, and for some people it does, use your eyes instead. Name five things you can see. Four you can hear. Three you can touch. Two you can smell. One you can taste. It sounds too simple to work. It works because it occupies the part of the mind that was rehearsing, and gives it something real to do.

Neither of these makes the waiting pleasant. What they can do is interrupt the spiral for a while.

The days themselves need a shape

The interval is easier when it is not empty.

Keep the ordinary outline of your days. The walk, the grocery run, the phone call on Thursday. The appointment stays on the calendar either way, and a day cleared of everything else leaves nothing in it but the waiting.

Tell one person the actual date. One person, rather than the whole family, and without opening a conversation about outcomes. Somebody who simply knows what day it is, so you are not managing everyone else’s worry on top of your own.

Decide in advance where the what if thought goes. It will arrive. It always arrives. Have somewhere to put it: a notebook, a walk, the breathing above.

And put something on the calendar for the day after the appointment. Something small and ordinary that you would enjoy. It gives the interval an edge, and it quietly tells you that you expect there to be a day after.

Other people will want to help, and a few will not know how

Word gets out that you have an appointment, and then the phone starts.

Most of it is kindness. Some of it is work — the friend who knows someone who had exactly this and wants to tell you how it turned out, the relative who asks for updates you do not have, the person who needs reassuring by you, about your own test.

Decide one sentence now, before you need it, and use it every time. I am waiting on results, I do not know anything yet, and I will tell you when I do. Then change the subject. It ends a conversation you cannot afford to keep having, and it saves you explaining the same non-news eleven times in a week.

And if somebody starts in on the story about their cousin, you are allowed to stop them. I would rather not hear that one right now is enough, and anyone worth the phone call will take it well.

When the news is real

Sometimes the result is not what you hoped, and no amount of calm will have changed what the test found. Calm was never going to do that, and any promise otherwise deserves your suspicion.

What it changes is the state you arrive in. If there is a hard conversation to have, you want to be rested enough to hear it, steady enough to ask your questions, and clear enough to remember the answers. Two weeks of no sleep does not prepare you for that. It spends you before you get there.

Nothing written here replaces your doctor, your appointment, or the care you need. It is for the hours in between, which are yours to live through either way.

If you want the longer version of this

Everything above is one piece of a larger thing — what to do with a nervous system that has been on alert for years, rather than only for the two weeks before an appointment.

That is what Finding Calm is for. It is a gentle guide to stress management, built for a body that is in its sixties, seventies or eighties, and every practice in it can be done from a chair, in bed, or in a waiting room.

There is no program to keep up with and nothing to fall behind on. It moves in three simple steps you can take in any order: notice what stress is doing in your body before it takes the day, release it with breathwork, gentle somatic practice and meditation that work in minutes, and repeat whatever turns out to work for you until you have a small toolkit of your own.

Inside there is the plain-language explanation of why stress hits harder after sixty, breathwork that calms in about ninety seconds, somatic practices so gentle they barely look like movement, meditation that never asks you to empty your mind, a chapter on what to do when the stress is other people, and a resource library with word-for-word scripts, modifications for different physical abilities, and quick-reference cards for the moments you need something fast.

It is $19.99, down from $24.99. You can read it online on any device or download the printable version, and it is yours to keep.

PS — If your subscription includes Plus + All Guides, this guide is already yours: you can download it from this page. If it doesn’t yet, you can upgrade there too.

And if the wider version of this is what you recognize — the tiredness underneath that sleep does not touch — that one is already written, and it is free.

PS — My mother’s results came back, and everything is fine 🎉🎉🎉