It’s scan time on the cancer support forums…no matter which group, there seems to be a rash of folks having follow-up scans. Several months ago, a Colon Talk poster coined the term ‘scanxiety’ for the out-of-emotional-control days before a scan and while waiting for results – and right now the collected emotions involved in anticipating tests, worrying about results, waiting for doctors’ offices to call, is in full roar in many cancer communities.

Since my diagnosis in April, 2004, I’ve had over 50 CT scans, a half-dozen MRIs, a PET scan, five mammograms, four sonograms, and five chest x-rays. No, I don’t glow in the dark, yet, but I suppose that’s a possible outcome at this rate of monitoring. Frankly, give me the opportunity to live long enough to worry about that. For the time being, I think it’s more critical to worry about taking a hard look at my body on a regular basis to make sure that my cancer stays in remission – and if I end up being a touch over-exposed, I’ll worry about that later.

Still, all those scans and tests can take an emotional toll – if we let them.

For one very long 13 months of treatment that started in 2005 and ended with liver resection surgery in 2006, I had a new CT scan every 8 weeks. I was scanned so frequently that I began to be digestively sensitive to the Gastrovue contrast medium – all of the intestinal upsets of chemo flavored with raspberry Crystal Light. Sometime around the mid-point of that treatment, I had to cram a scan in between a hellacious couple of weeks at work, including travel to the New Jersey sites of the company where I work. One task spilled over into the next and all of a sudden, I was riding the uptown #6 train to Sloan-Kettering – realizing that for most of the last week I’d had no time to even think about my upcoming scan, much less worry about it.

Seems I could stay way over-busy and prevent scanxiety. Hmm. It took me a couple more scans to perfect the over-scheduled-no-worries approach. But while I was working on that, I realized that it was a helluva lot of work to keep the sounds of my own mental wheels from running me off the road and over the cliff into crazy land. Distraction worked, but I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace. And then I came to terms with something I realized about the whole scanxiety thing. I realized that I could control when I had them (to some extent) and when I scheduled the doctor’s appointments (to some extent.) But I decided it might be easier to work on coming to terms with what I could – and couldn’t – control about my tests.

The results.

Tests and scans are status reports – and once I figured out that I could distract myself from worrying about them, I realized that my worry had nothing to do with the statuses those reports relayed. Nothing *I* could do was going to affect those results – and worry was a waste of energy I could use in much more satisfying ways.

Don’t worry – isn’t that easier said than done?

Sometimes. I do let myself get a little crazy about packing and laundry and leaving those things to the last minute for my NYC trips. But since that break in my worrying and the clarity it presented around my 20th scan, I’ve been trying to minimize the time I let my cancer – and my worrying about scans – waste. Meditating every day helps. Finding the ordinary beautiful and delighting in it helps. Exercising, to the extent that I can, helps. Training Madison, cuddling with Casey helps. Writing poetry helps. Every little thing that keeps me in the here and now helps.

My anxiety interruptus muscles (I’m sure there are several) need to be worked, hard and regularly, in order to be at their strongest every four months when I need them to keep performing. But if meditating, walking and breathing in and out makes them the only muscles I get the chance to work every day, then that workout is worth the investment.

Do you get anxious about follow-up visits and tests? How do you cope?