My Four Days After Hearing “Cancerous”

You’d think hearing “cancerous” out loud, from a professional, looking you in the eye — you’d think that word alone would be enough to knock the denial clean out of a man.

It wasn’t.

I spent the month before that Monday morning time-bargaining. Pushing it off. Telling myself it was a tongue bite, a nerve, Bell’s palsy rearing its head again after twenty-five years. I’ve already told you how that ended — two “oh my’s,” a dentist who didn’t flinch from being honest, and a word I wasn’t ready for.

What I haven’t told you is what happened in the four days after.

Because you’d figure that’s where the fear moves in. That’s where a man starts Googling survival rates at two in the morning and spiraling down every dark hallway his brain can find.

Not me.

Not those four days.

Looking back, I’ve wondered more than once whether that kind of denial is normal when you might have cancer. How can somebody hear the word cancerous and still go right back to convincing himself everything is going to be fine?

I don’t have an answer for everybody.

But I know what happened to me.

How Denial Survives a Direct Hit

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about denial — it doesn’t need the absence of information to survive. It’ll dig in even after you’ve got the information sitting right in front of you.

I know now, hindsight being what it is, that many spots on the tongue or inside the mouth can turn out to be benign. I didn’t know percentages back then. I wasn’t researching any of that.

I just decided mine would be benign because that was the answer I needed.

And once I decided it, I went to work making sure everybody around me stayed there too.

The guys at the terminal knew I’d been to the dentist Monday. They knew something was going on. And when the conversation started drifting toward what that might mean — I steered it.

Every time.

Kept it light. Kept it “it’s probably nothing.” Kept moving the conversation toward benign before anybody had the chance to sit in the other possibility with me.

Looking back, that wasn’t me being tough.

That was me on defense, running the same play over and over so nobody could tackle me with the truth.

A House Running on Opposite Clocks

Here’s a detail that mattered more than I realized at the time: I work nights.

So the afternoon I left that dentist’s office, I went home, slept through the day, and went back to work that night. Barb was up during the day, gone to work herself, home while I was gone.

Our schedules crossed for maybe a few minutes here and there.

That gap in our clocks gave the denial room to breathe.

We just didn’t have the hours together to sit down and go there — the what-ifs, the possibility, any of it.

And in the few minutes we did have together, I was still steering.

Still keeping it benign.

Still not opening the door to the conversation neither one of us wanted to walk through yet.

I Don’t Think She Was Fooled

Here’s the part I’ve turned over the most since.

I don’t think Barb believed the denial the way I did.

I think — and this is me looking back with everything I know now — some part of her may have sensed this was more serious than I was willing to let myself believe.

She never pushed.

Never dragged me into the conversation I was avoiding.

She just let me keep swimming in denial for those four days.

Which is impressive, considering I’ve never even been to Egypt.

Sorry. I’m a dad. That one was going to happen eventually.

Bad joke aside, I see those four days differently now.

At the time, I probably thought Barb was trusting my read on things. Maybe she was. But now I wonder if there was something else happening too.

Maybe she simply knew me well enough to understand that I wasn’t ready to go any further down that road.

Maybe she sensed something I wasn’t willing to sense yet.

I don’t know exactly what was going through her mind. I can only tell you what I see looking backward.

She didn’t force me out of denial.

She stayed beside me while I was in it.

Four days later, sitting in Dr. McConnell’s office, she would be the one to finally ask the question outright.

One question.

Two words back.

That’s a different day.

But I’ll tell you this — everything you just read is exactly what the two of us carried into that room with us.

Love Is Patient

I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it differently now.

Sometimes loving somebody doesn’t mean forcing them to process something on your timetable. Sometimes it means being there while their mind catches up with what their ears have already heard.

When I look back at Barb during those four days, one passage keeps coming to mind.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (NIV) — “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

I’ve heard those verses more times than I could count. Weddings. Church. Bible studies.

But “love is patient” means something different to me when I look back at those four days.

Barb didn’t have to fix my denial.

She didn’t have to make me say cancer.

She didn’t have to make me admit what neither one of us knew yet.

She just stayed beside me while I wasn’t ready to go there.

And maybe that was exactly what I needed.

If You’re In Those Days Right Now

If you’re waiting for answers about a possible cancer diagnosis right now — steering conversations, keeping things light, doing the math in your head so it always comes out benign — I understand.

I did the same thing.

There’s no shame in your mind needing time to catch up.

But there’s something I understand now that I didn’t understand then:

Emotional denial and delaying medical care are not the same thing.

You don’t have to emotionally accept everything today.

You don’t have to Google every possibility.

You don’t have to spend tonight imagining treatments you may never need or outcomes that may never happen.

But keep the appointment.

Get the test.

Show up for the consultation.

Take the next step.

You can still be scared. You can still convince yourself it’ll be nothing. You can even spend a few days swimming in denial.

Just keep moving forward while you’re doing it.

Because sometimes your heart and your mind need a little longer to get where your feet are already taking you.

And if you’ve got someone patient enough to walk beside you while you get there, don’t mistake their silence for not understanding.

They may be carrying more than you know.

“She didn’t force me out of denial. She stayed beside me while I was in it.”

— Scott

Nobody Fights Alone

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” — Philippians 4:13