PET Scans and Pregnancy Tests

It was 7:30 on a Tuesday morning, but under the fluorescent lights of the windowless waiting room, it could have been any time of day or night. I glanced around, avoiding eye contact with the tired, nervous faces around me. I'd checked in for my PET scan some time ago, but there had been a delay.

As a young, healthy-looking woman wearing a patient bracelet, I already felt conspicuous in a cancer center. But when they called my name, the staff seemed particularly surprised. One look at me, and they insisted on a pregnancy test before proceeding.

No one wants to inject radioactive material into a potentially pregnant woman, after all…

So here I am on this early morning, waiting for a PET scan to tell me if this cancer is still there while also waiting to find out if my body, oblivious to this threat of fast-dividing mutant cells, has managed to simultaneously conceive a new life.

And the strange thing was, part of me wished the pregnancy test would be positive.

Not because I actually wanted to be pregnant. Not then. Not while waiting for a scan that might tell me my cancer had returned.

But because I wanted to be the kind of woman who could be pregnant.

I wanted to be healthy enough to carry another life. I wanted to live in a world where a pregnancy test meant anticipation and possibility, rather than another frightening complication.

And yet the other part of me was terrified. A pregnancy would have been dangerous, for me and for a baby. It was more than I could bear to contemplate. Just another impossible thing to carry.

I just wanted my PET scan.

I wanted to know if the cancer was back.

The irony. The paradox. Life and death are in a constant cycle in this world, but all occurring simultaneously in the same body? It feels impossible. As if our bodies should know that in the midst of a cancerous invasion we might want to downgrade our fertility, shunt resources to the greater battle, and hunker down for the sake of our survival. But cancer doesn't play by these rules, and I am the perfect example of it.

And I know just how possible it is.

I look back at photographs of myself when I first noticed the changes in my breast that would eventually lead to my cancer diagnosis. At the time, I chalked them up to pregnancy. I was smiling. I looked happy. Healthy.

It wasn't until after my baby was born that I finally received the diagnosis.

One of the most unnerving things about cancer is that not only can you be growing a new life while your body is secretly betraying you, but that you don't even know the treachery is happening. Why wouldn't your body refuse to conceive? Send out an SOS, blow the horn, sound an alarm. Have some terrible rash show up or feel tired and sick or SOMETHING.

But no, the overthrow is silent, secret, and deadly. Your own body is happily whistling along while cancer creeps along, softly and quietly strangling your own cells to death.

And it didn't invade like an enemy from a foreign land. Or come across you one day in the grocery store when someone coughed. It comes from your very own body. Your very own cells gone haywire.

The ultimate mutiny.

And as it turns out, life and death don't just coexist within our bodies. They have a way of showing up together everywhere else, too.

If you are one of those people who likes to categorize life into neat little boxes with labels, the idea that life and death are colliding inside you can be especially disconcerting. We want to think that youth and beauty and health go in this season of life. Sorrow and hardship come later. But what I could not anticipate is the boxes being shoved together so forcefully that the contents spill out, mixing and churning together in a melding of lived experience.

The joy of bringing new life into the world alongside the panic of facing a disease that may remove you from the storyline of that new little person's life.

Celebrating my good results while mourning the passing of a friend who didn't get them.

Receiving bad news while wearing a party hat, minutes before singing happy birthday to a child.

I suppose I wanted life to come in its proper order. A time to bring children into the world. A time to raise them. A time to grow old. And eventually, a time to die.

But cancer doesn't respect the order of things.

It shows up in the middle of birthday parties and bedtime stories. It sits beside you at the dinner table and follows you into the school pickup line.

It doesn't wait for the children to grow up.

And so there I sat, in that dreaded waiting room, waiting for two tests. One to tell me whether a new life had begun. The other to tell me whether mine was in danger.

To the staff, I was simply a woman of childbearing age. A box that needed to be checked before they could proceed.

But to me, that little test represented an entire life I was no longer sure I could have.

I didn't even want it to be positive.

I just wished I lived in a world where I could have wanted it to be.

Questions for Your Waiting Room

1. When has life unfolded differently than you expected? What was the hardest part of adjusting to that unexpected reality?

2. Is there something you once hoped for that you now recognize may never happen? How have you processed the loss of that possibility?

3. Can you think of a time when joy and sorrow were both present in your life? How did your faith in God shape the way you experienced both? Did you find it difficult to trust His goodness while grieving what you had lost?