Routine Scan is an Oxymoron

I lie on the cool plastic table, head strapped down,  an IV piercing my arm.  Moments later the contrast dye courses through my veins, bringing with it the now-familiar feeling of burning throughout my core.

"Hold still, don't swallow," chirps the pleasant voice over the sound system.

What is it about someone telling me not to swallow that makes me NEED to swallow?

The CT scan machine clicks and whirs, and I slide slowly through its dilated eye.  Usually I close my eyes, but today I opened them, observing with an odd detachment the lens zooming by, photographing my insides slice by slice.

This machine is here to help me, I think, repeating the mantra over and over.

I'm at the hospital for my 6 month head and neck CT scan.  "Routine Scan" it's called, although for anyone with cancer there is never, ever such a thing as a routine scan.

More clicks and whirs and I slide slowly out of the machine.  As always, I scrutinize the technician's face for any sign of trouble.  Is her brow a little furrowed?  Maybe she just has gas.  She is a pro, though, and quickly smiles and tells me to head on up to my doctor's office for initial results.

As I sit, and sit, and sit in the dreading head-and-neck oncology waiting room, I peruse my fellow soldiers.  Many of them are in obvious discomfort physically - raw sutures, drainage bags, yellowed bandages, missing parts of ears and jaws and necks.

Some, like me, look normal, and I know their discomfort is tucked neatly away on the inside.

After fifteen minutes of waiting, I am thoroughly convinced there is a team of specialists hovered around my scan slides, scratching their heads and saying, "we've never seen it spread this fast before ... you did say you got all the cancer?"

Five more minutes and I'm a certifiable wreck, although I'm a pro at this now, too, so you'd never know it by looking at my face, which reflects only boredom.

Finally I'm called into the office, and the doctor doesn't waste any time to say the scan looked good.  My shoulders fall about a foot, released tension flowing off me in waves.  He tells me the scans still need to go to radiology for further screening and to call next week if I haven't heard from him.

My shoulders inch up just a tad -- not quite scott free, but almost.

He scopes my nose and my throat and feels the scar tissue on my neck.  I still have no feeling down the whole left hand side of my head and neck where the surgery was.  He tells me this is "routine".

Snapping off his gloves he says, "Looks good.  We'll have another routine scan in 6 months, but I think this time we'll include your chest area, just to be sure."

I nod mutely, swallowing the "WHAT DO YOU MEAN? JUST TO BE SURE OF WHAT?" that threatens to burst out of my mouth.  He means just to be sure there isn't any cancer there.  Why belabor the point?

I cast one more glance around the waiting room as I schedule my next appointment.  It has filled up some -- a woman on a stretcher, her young son holding her hand.   A woman with both eyes bandaged shut.  A man with oxygen flowing in through his nostrils and half his jaw missing.

My fellow fighters.

To us, there is never going to be another "routine" medical exam again.  Ever.   I lean into this knowledge, resist the urge to run away from it, screaming.

It's just how it is, now.  Unroutine is our new routine.