healing through words

The morning of my first PET scan was one of those days when the world seemed to echo my mood. Heavy clouds pressed down on the city, the rain drumming steadily on the windows, and everything felt grey, sodden, and cold. I had woken early, not because I wanted to, but because fear had shaken me awake long before dawn. I had lain there in the half-dark, listening to my own heart pounding, thinking about what was coming.

This wasn’t just a medical appointment – this was the day that it would all become official. The scan would tell us if the cancer had spread, if it had already crept into my bones, my lungs, my liver. If it had, my future would shrink from decades to years, maybe even months. Every nightmare possibility seemed to press itself into my brain. I couldn’t push the thoughts away, and they just kept getting worse and worse.

I told myself to get up, to focus on the practicalities. Fasting was required for the scan, which had turned into its own private hell. My mind was obsessed with the idea that my blood sugar would drop too low. I became utterly convinced I’d faint before I even got into the machine, that the fasting itself would finish me. I had been told when I was pregnant in 2015 that I was pre-diabetic and this had stuck with me for years after. My fear wasn’t the scan itself, or even the results. It was that I would collapse before I made it through the door.

By the time my parents arrived to collect me, I’d managed to assemble myself into something that looked like a functioning human. I packed my bag carefully, every small task performed with exaggerated control, as if neatness and order might trick the chaos inside me into subsiding. Lip balm. Water bottle. A book I wouldn’t read. A scarf to keep me warm. I smoothed my clothes and plastered on a brave face before stepping outside.

My husband had kissed me goodbye at the door. I told him I’d be fine, absolutely fine! Nothing to worry about! The words came out bright, cheerful, rehearsed. Inside, my heart was hammering so hard I thought it might crack my ribs. My legs felt like lead. I didn’t want him to see. I wanted him to believe I was strong. I needed him to.

When I slipped into the back seat of my parents’ car, I kept up the act. I smiled, chatted, pointed out the rain streaking across the windscreen, made bland observations about the morning traffic. We even spoke about the news, the weather, the most ordinary of things. Anything but the terrible darkness crouched between us. Anything but cancer.

It was 9:30 a.m. when we arrived, early enough that we had time to sit outside in the car, waiting. My parents, patient as ever, made no demands of me. They didn’t pry into my thoughts. They just waited. I knew they were there, holding me up in ways they couldn’t see, even as I played the role of the cheerful daughter.

When it came time to go in, my mother wanted to stay, but the street was too crowded, no space to park. And so, they drove away, leaving me standing there. For a moment I was no longer a grown woman in my forties. I was a preschooler again, dropped at the door of some unfamiliar, intimidating building. My small hands empty. My stomach clenched tight. Weak. Small. Afraid.

Inside, the walls smelled of disinfectant and something faintly metallic. The waiting room was a blur of grey chairs and other pale, anxious faces. I was wet, cold, hungry and miserable. I could see my husband and parents messaging each other in the chat, worried about me, worried I would fall apart, worried I would stumble at the first hurdle. My name was called. The nurse’s voice was gentle but brisk, and I followed her down a narrow corridor to the room where they would insert the cannula.

I told her I needed to lie down. The fear of needles had grown monstrous in my mind. I was sure I would faint if I sat upright, sure the floor would rush up at me before she even touched me. She didn’t argue. She helped me onto the narrow bed, adjusted the pillow, and slid the needle into my vein with practised ease. I closed my eyes and breathed through it, every muscle tense, my body locked in dread.

Then came the strangest part.

They led me into a small, dim room where I was to sit alone for an hour while the radioactive sugar coursed through my veins, hunting down any sinister beings that might be lurking in the dark corners of my body. I sat in the chair, wrapped in a thin blanket, listening to the rain on the roof. I could feel the fear still gripping me, my mind spinning circles: What if it’s everywhere? What if I can’t cope? What if this is the beginning of the end?

But then something shifted.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a momentous occasion. It was more like a switch being flicked in my brain. A clarity that rose slowly, uninvited, undeniable. My heart slowed. The spinning stopped. I saw the truth as plain as daylight: if I stayed in this state – wracked with fear, paralysed by dread – I would not survive this. The cancer wouldn’t even need to kill me. Fear would do the job all on its own.

I remember sitting back in that chair, the blanket around my shoulders, and feeling the anxiety float away like mist. In its place, something else rose up. A steely resolve. It crept up my spine, stiffened my back. My thoughts sharpened into a single, solid sentence:

Fuck this.

I was not going to let this win. I would not be defined by terror. I would not shrink into the shadows while the cancer raged. I would fight it. I would outlast it. I would beat it.

It was an odd mix of defiance and peace. Not the absence of fear entirely – I knew it would return in waves, again and again – but the knowledge that I could meet it differently. That I could choose not to let it hollow me out. That I could be stronger than I had ever imagined. I was certain now that there was an absolute difference between anxiety and fear. I vaguely wondered if I had been deliberately making myself anxious all these years, and why I would do such a thing. I decided to pack that away for further inspection at a later date.

When the time came, I walked into the PET scanner room without hesitation. The machine looked enormous, a white tunnel humming with quiet menace, but I no longer felt like a child about to be swallowed whole. This was a moment of reckoning, a time for me to stop running away from difficult things, and to face them head on. I lay down on the cold surface, arms above my head, and let them slide me in.

The scan itself was long, silent, claustrophobic. I lay perfectly still, listening to the buzz and whir of the machine, feeling my breath rise and fall. I imagined the radioactive sugar racing through me, illuminating my insides, shining a light into every dark place. Each time I felt fear rising within me, I didn’t let it consume me; instead, I examined it gently, turning it over in my mind.

When it was over, I didn’t emerge triumphant – I emerged changed. I had finally confronted the truth of my fear: I was afraid of myself, afraid I couldn’t trust myself to survive something terrifying. But now I knew I could. I had the proof.

Outside, the rain had eased into a drizzle. I sat in the clinic cafe eating a mandated cheese sandwich and lukewarm coffee while I waited for my parents. I didn’t tell anyone about the switch that had flicked in my brain, or about the quiet vow I’d made in that lonely little room. That was mine to keep, my armour hidden beneath my skin. But I knew, with absolute certainty, that something fundamental had shifted, and I would never be the same again.