Health Scare Good News and Bad News

Hi, I’m Haley! Book midwife (editor) and author. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this work and gain access to exclusive content:

“I think we need to do a CT scan,” my doctor told me with a concerned expression. “You say this abdominal pain has been going on for more than a year?"

“Well, off and on. And it’s pretty mild. It doesn’t hurt all the time! I’ve been mostly ignoring it,” I tried to explain, while internally beating myself up about how incredibly dumb it was that I had waited so long to make an appointment. The pain and tenderness hadn’t been ruining my life—it was just kind of there and then disappeared for weeks.

“Well, we shouldn’t ignore this. Let’s get a scan scheduled immediately.”

This wasn’t what I expected. Making at appointment over this at all had felt silly, an overreaction. Who has time to run to the doctor over mild anything? I expected the appointment to end with, “sounds like it’s nothing! Carry on!” A CT scan sounded like my doctor was taking this much more seriously than I had been. And Dr. Google (I know! I know! He’s the world’s worst physician but I just can’t quit him!) was decidedly alarming. Chronic and recurrent abdominal pain and tenderness can be any number of things—most of them…well, not good. Some very, very bad.

Here we go again—a memento mori Lent. I remembered the Ash Wednesday several years ago when I found a lump in my breast. With a family history of breast cancer (my mom), I felt paralyzed with anxiety. It took weeks to see a doctor and then get referred for imaging and then waiting even longer for the results. In the meantime, I really wrestled with mortality for the first time. I was going to die. Maybe soon, maybe later. Maybe of breast cancer, maybe of something else. But I was going to die. Until then, death was what happened to other people. But that Lent, the youthful belief I was immortal and untouchable evaporated. My results finally came back that the lump wasn’t cancer, but the reality of my mortality remained. (But I still have four school-aged children and I’m not eager to leave them anytime soon.)