The shifting cluster of white coats descending upon my cubicle last August was diverse, and most welcome. I explained what’s wrong with me, and they explained what they needed to do. Since I was coming from another hospital, with information about previous tests, they needed time to take a look at the pathology reports and the scans. Give them two weeks, they asked. Tough to wait like that, they said. But necessary, since the previous docs had diagnosed a very rare form of pre-cancerous tumors.

They were almost out the door when Michael recalled the other nagging revelation from the diagnostic test called an “EUS”: there’d been something, a shadow or something, spotted on my liver. What would the GI docs be doing about that? A flurry of murmurs. “Probably nothing,” seemed the consensus, and with general noises of dismissal, they were gone.

I’m a graduate of UAB, half my family’s been working or going to school at UAB my whole life, my friends work for the University, the writers I know write about UAB. I make enough money hosting UAB’s international medical students at my home to call myself a writer. I hear people around the world praise UAB’s prowess as a place of healing, and I’ve never, ever met a cancer patient from UAB who wasn’t receiving impeccable care.

At first, the intersection of my cancer and UAB seemed like a gift. I’d discovered late in the game there was a possibility of cancer, the previous doctor’s office had dropped the ball, and in late August, the earliest available appointment with UAB’s GI Clinic was in early November. Then I got a call: a cacellation could put me in to see Dr W— in just ten days. “Yes, yes, yes,” I sang, because waiting for bad news is such a toxic state of being.

So. Two weeks of waiting. Fourteen days, a mere 20,160 minutes. I’ve learned to live one day at a time and even one minute at a time. I know about mindfulness and compartmentalization and when to take a nice deep breath*. I’ve got my very best friend in the world by my side, family never far away, and not one but two long-standing, deep-rooted support communities available seven days a week. I’ve got a sense of humor, a car that runs, and a reasonably stable (if small) income. I have a bike I just learned to ride in fall 2016. Dragon*Con was a glorious four-day fill of fantasy and fun and loopiness. I decided not to drink any alcohol because I was, a little, worried about my liver. As always, travel beckoned, pocketbook negated the possibility but I dreamed about roller coasters and foreign beaches anyway.

And I waited. Two weeks to the day, ten a.m., I called the GI Clinic. I’m not sure if I spoke with someone physically in the GI Clinic, although I thought I was talking with a medical professional of a sort. I believe now most of my contact was through a UAB call center, a building somewhere on campus surely teeming with polite young men and women who take and relay messages, strictly on a 8 a.m. -5 p.m. schedule.

The person on the other end of the line told me that Dr. W-, my doctor, was on vacation, and would be out for ten days. I stammered a bit. I couldn’t fathom the idea of waiting another ten whole days. Then I told her I was anxious to hear my test results. She perked right up and said Dr. A- was covering for his boss and she’d leave him the message. When the doc picked up my message, she’d call me, she explained. Then she’d call again, a few hours later, to make sure the doctor actually made contact. I was impressed with the thoroughness of this telephone protocol and somewhat mollified.

Twenty-four hours later, I had another operator on the line. Dr. A- hadn’t picked up the message, she told me. And even once he picked up the message I had to allow him 24-48 hours to return my call. I gritted my teeth and politely left a second message. Wednesday, I got teary on the phone, the operator prayed with me and for me, then connected me with an actual person sitting in the GI Clinic. This young woman told me that Dr. A- saw my message and commented out loud to her that he didn’t know what test results I was referring to, so why should he return the call.

By this point, I’d developed a really weird thing about my cell phone. It became a focal point for my anxiety, and I developed a sick sort of love/hate cycle of letting the charge run out, losing the charger, accidentally turning off the ringer, leaving the phone at home or in the car. So this three days I was waiting for the call back from Dr. A- was a frantic dance with and about that fucking piece of plastic, culminated by my actually leaving it on a shelf in Walmart and driving cross-town. It seemed to take a Herculean effort to keep my phone in working order and answering it as painful as a root canal. I still wince when it tweets, pings or rings.

My phone had been lost for a couple hours when Dr. A- finally returned my call, and I was not in a good mood. His first question was this: “Why haven’t you signed up on the patient portal?” Nobody had told me how to sign up, was my answer, this and all other times he asked. He was jazzed about my test results. “It’s really, really rare! We’re going to present it next Tuesday!” I asked him if the UAB pathology report confirmed the findings of the first doctors. “Oh, no, they got it all wrong,” he replied cheerfully. “It’s not a neuropappillarysuchand so at all, it’s a blatheringblahblah.”

“It’s what?”

“Blatheringblahblah.”

“Aaah, is that cancer?”

“Ms. Zweifel.” Very stern. “Why haven’t you signed up on the patient portal? It’s very important that your doctors be able to communicate with you.”

Away we went. I answered him, then circled back round to the question of whether this was a cancer diagnosis or not. He asked about the patient portal again instead of answering. It took like three days after having the conversation to put it all together, but every single time I asked that poor doctor if it was cancer, he changed the subject to my noncompliance about the patient portal. He had to know I had pancreatic cancer, but he didn’t want to tell me. And I had no one else to ask. It would be another ten days after this confused and confusing conversation before I saw a doctor, and a month before I spoke to an oncologist.

 

*whenever it occurs to me, the more often the better