I prayed for patience and my prayer was answered—in the form
of a cancer diagnosis.
Cancer demands patience. More patience than you knew you
had, more than you knew you were even capable of.
Every trip to the doctor’s office—and there’s rarely just
one practitioner that you see—requires that you wait your turn for an interval ranging
from minutes to hours, depending upon how busy the doctor happens to be that
day and the level of complication of the case that walks in the door just ahead
of you.
Cancer offers you endless tests, each of which has its own
incubation period for rendering results. You wait with bated breath for each
call, wondering if it will clear you or further seal your fate.
Chemotherapy ties you down in a most literal way, tethering
you to an IV as you wait for an excruciatingly slow drip, drip, drip to be
done, done, done; counting up or down, depending upon where you are in your
quest to complete the magic number of cycles that your oncologist has prescribed
to beat back the dragon.
Add to that the time you end up investing in things like
radiation, physical therapy, or alternative treatments and it begins to feel
like you’ve added a full-time job of sitting idle to your already packed
schedule.
You learn—early on—that waiting is part of the journey. Of
all the things cancer will teach you, perhaps its most important lesson will be
to quit running around like a chicken with its head cut off as you race from
one thing to another, multi-tasking, always trying to jam more into a twenty-four
hour day than is humanly possible.
Cancer forces you to stop, to take a breath, to prioritize
what is really important. Cancer tells you to say no, to respect the limitations
it puts on your body. Try to resist and WHAM! You're down for the count with
bone-crushing fatigue, gut-wrenching nausea, a prolonged dizzy spell, or any
number of other worrisome symptoms designed to put you on pause.
And somewhere, in the middle of all of this waiting, you
discover that you really don't mind it so much. In fact, you rather enjoy those
found moments when you can be alone with your thoughts, catch up on your
reading, or simply immerse yourself in noticing the way the sun is shining
through the window in dappled patches of warmth.
You find yourself less inclined to tap your foot as you
stand in line at the grocery store, less likely to snap at the child who still
hasn't put on his shoes despite numerous reminders to do so. The tick-tock of
minutes slipping away has been muted to the point that you no longer even notice
it.
You recognize that every passing minute is another that
you've been granted, and that miracle brings you to a whole new level of joy.