The Cancer Call

3 Tips to Ease the Wait

Photo by Jae Park on Unsplash

Author’s note ~ This article is available in English, Spanish, Italian

I’m writing this on the eve of my 32nd cancer call. For those of you who have never heard of such a communication, it’s the term I use after I have been tested for cancer and I am awaiting the results. I must admit, my score is awesome. Cancer: 1, Me: 30. That pesky little 1 doesn’t seem to stack up to 30 when I see it written here in black and white. However, having lived through getting the cancer call in the affirmative 1 time was enough to change my life forever.

My friends know by now that I allow myself 2 weeks out of the 52 week calendar year to freak the fuck out about my cancer status. I had a particularly gnarly type of cancer called Chordoma. The average life span of a Chordoma survivor was 5–7 years when I first got diagnosed in 2013. With the advances made in medicine, the average life span is 9 years now. The fact that I am on the brink of my 7th year Chordoma free is no small feat. I ping pong back and forth between, “I did it! I beat the odds!” to “I should have died 7 years ago, why am I still here?” to “If I am just like the statistics, it’s any day now that my life is going to take a dramatic plunge again.”

I’ll be the first to confess, it is a very demanding way to move through the world. Being faced with my…