Waiting...

The toughest part about almost anything major in life is the waiting factor. If you and a loved one or your family have made plans to go on a cruise in the summer and it's only January, those next six months are going to seem like a couple years.

It's especially difficult when one is awaiting the results to something regarding their or a loved one's health or a judge's decision in a case. One may take those catscans, MRI's, X-Rays, EEG's, or whatever kind of scan they receive and that's the easy part. The hard part is waiting to find out the results. All the hypothetical situations will race in one's mind. They'll think of the worst, the best, the in-betweeners, so that they can attempt to be prepared for any and all results.

Just not knowing is extremely difficult. A spot was found in my brain back in August of '99. My neurologist told me they couldn't be sure what kind of spot it was. In other words, they couldn't be sure if it was benign or malignant. So, I had to wait and go in once every month or so to check and see if the spot had grown any. I had a long time to wait before the doctors could be conclusive on if the tumor was cancerous or not. Yeah, that was not fun. After about a year worth of MRI's, they finally decided it was benign. But, I would've given about anything to just have known on the spot (no pun intended) what it was and what had to be done about it. If it was malignant, allright, let's do the surgery right now. If it was benign, allright, we can wait on the surgery I suppose.

Perhaps that old saying is right, "Patience is a virtue," because we need a great deal of patience in order to get through life sanely, especially during such times that I described above.