The Five-Day Gap Between “Not Good” and My Biopsy

The waiting room is not the chairs we sat in at Dr. McConnell’s office. It is the five days of life that kept moving around us while my mind went somewhere else entirely.

Work did not stop. The grass still needed cutting. Groceries still needed buying. Trailers still needed hooking. Life just kept on going like it always does, and I was expected to go with it — show up, do the job, be the husband, be the dad, laugh at the right times.

Only I was not fully there. Not really. I was living in two places at once — one foot in East Tennessee, the other somewhere out in the deep end of my own head, treading water nobody else could see.

That was the waiting room. And I spent five days sitting in it.

“Not Good”

We left Dr. McConnell’s office, and Barb and I made a decision on the drive home without ever really saying it out loud: we were not going to the dark place. We would deal with whatever it was when we knew what it was.

A biopsy was set for Monday. It was Wednesday.

Five days.

I want to be honest with you about something I did not understand until I looked back on it a year later: I did not go into that consultation just hopeful. I went in still holding onto denial, still flirting with false hope, still telling myself a story where none of this turned out to be what it was starting to look like.

Two professionals had now said the word cancerous out loud in front of me, and I still had not researched a single thing about it. I did not ask a single question I should have asked. My mind was too busy floating through every “what if” to actually land anywhere useful.

I told myself I was protecting Barb. Looking back, I think I was protecting myself too.

Wednesday Night

Denial had carried me a long way, nearly a month of finding explanations that allowed this to be anything, but what it was beginning to look like. But after two professionals used the word cancer, the story I had built around myself began to crack.

I think it started that Wednesday night.

That was when fear showed up before faith ever got a word in.

Existing, Not Living

The next few days, I did what I always do. I went to work. Walked into the driver’s room, got dispatched, hooked my trailers, gave the guys grief the way I always do, and got on the road. Three hours over to Nashville with the radio and the phone keeping me somewhat distracted.

The weekend came. I put the headphones on and cut the grass. Kroger. Walmart. Coffee with everything except the mowing.

From the outside, nothing had changed. I was still cutting up with the guys, still telling the same kind of jokes that have no business ever showing up on this website. Everybody around me was getting the same Scott they always got.

But the best way I can describe those five days is this: the light was on, but nobody was home. I was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. My mind was not sitting still worrying, it was doing something more like dodgeball, weaving in and out, constantly running without ever actually arriving anywhere.

I would leave the waiting room for a while — hook a trailer, give somebody a hard time, three hours of highway with something to listen to — and then my thoughts would drift right back to “not good,” and I would be back inside it again. In and out, all week long.

When the noise in my head got too loud to out-drive, I reached for the same two things I have reached for my whole life: praise and worship music, and prayer. It did not make the noise disappear. It just gave me enough quiet inside myself to keep moving.

That habit did not start that week. It goes back further than cancer, further than I even realized at the time. That is a story for another day.

Two Separate Waiting Rooms

We did not sit around talking about cancer those five days. I was trying to protect Barb from what I was afraid of, and I did not realize until much later that she was trying to protect me too.

We were sitting in separate waiting rooms right beside each other.

Sunday Night

There was no more day left between me and Monday.

Mentally, I was somewhere I had not been in almost fifty years. When I was eleven or twelve, at the church campground, I dove off the dock and started swimming out toward the platform in the deep water — I knew how to swim, but I was way out past where I should have been.

Panic hit. My arms started flailing, and I remember yelling for help. People came at me from both directions. All I remember for certain is an arm wrapping around me and a voice saying, “I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.”

Forty-eight years later, curled up facing the wall in bed, I was back in that water. Fear arrived before faith did. I prayed. I kept praying until I fell asleep. I did not tell Barb. I did not want her to see the crack.

The fear did not leave. But something else started getting hold of me that night, a verse I now wear on my wrist and never take off:

“Be still and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10

Not, “You’ll be fine.” Not, “It’s nothing.” Just — be still.

Monday Morning

The storm was still there when I woke up Monday morning. Fear had not packed up and left overnight.

I got dressed. Barb, Pam, Brandy, and I climbed into the vehicle and headed toward Dr. McConnell’s office. We laughed. We joked. We did what families do when there is something too heavy sitting in the middle of the room and nobody quite knows how to say it out loud.

Then my name was called. I stood up, left Barb and the girls in the waiting room, and walked toward that door alone.

The storm was still there. I still did not know what they were about to find. But a phrase my dad Bernard had said my whole life came back to me — the faith he lived, not just talked about:

Dein Wille geschehe.

Thy will be done.

I did not say it because I suddenly felt fearless. I said it because I had reached the end of what I could control.

And I went in.

— Scott

Nobody Fights Alone

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