Cancer & Leadership Part 3: Don’t Wait
by Matt Monge
The waiting’s the worst.
And it’s one of cancer’s secret weapons I think, at least as it relates to the human psyche. Because there you sit–and there I sat–awaiting the results of the CT.
That part is really awful. Perhaps that’s partly because there’s just nothing you can do about it at that point. You’re going to sit on that uncomfortable doctor’s table/chair/bed thingy, trying to stay as still as you can. You do this not so much so that you can hear everything others are saying, but rather because you know that whenever you move, that thin, tissue-ish paper that’s forming a barely-there barrier between you and the table/chair/bed thingy makes a terrible racket.
So you sit. And you wait. And when the doctor comes in, you listen. But then…
It’s back to waiting. You’re almost held hostage, in a sense. I knew I had cancer, but I also knew that I had to wait for further tests. And then I had to wait for the surgery to be scheduled. After that I waited for surgery day to arrive.
And surgery day itself? What a nightmare. I had gotten myself so worked up waiting for all this to go down that I got a terrible migraine the morning of the surgery and–sorry if you have a sensitive stomach–vomited all over the hospital parking lot when I arrived at 0-dark-thirty in the morning.