How to Stay Calm While Waiting For a Test Result

Jancee Dunn is out this week. I’m Maxwell Strachan, an editor on the Well desk, filling in today.

A few months ago, my wife and I visited a fertility doctor in hopes of receiving a little help in our attempt to have a child. Midway through an ultrasound, in a way that suggested he was seeing something unusual, the doctor asked my wife if she’d had the scan before.

It turned out he had found an unidentifiable, large mass in her lower abdomen. Specifically, it looked like it was near one of her ovaries.

He told us that we needed to schedule an M.R.I., but not to panic. I went against the latter suggestion. In fact, I spent most of my waking hours freaking out. There were many things the mass could have been — a fibroid or, less likely, a cyst — but I fixated on worse scenarios.

Two weeks after the ultrasound, we learned that my wife was fine. She had fibroids, one as large as a grapefruit, but a fixable problem nonetheless. With cancer ruled out, I reflected on how anxious I’d felt, and how I’d been down this road before, when waiting for results from my own medical tests. I wished I’d been better equipped to handle the intervening weeks.

Waiting for test results is a common, awful part of life. Research has found that it can be as hard or harder than receiving an unwelcome diagnosis. That anxious feeling is so common that it has a name, at least in the context of cancer: “scanxiety.”

Inevitably, I’ll have to wait for another medical test result again one day, as will almost all of us. So I talked to therapists and doctors to find out how I could handle myself better the next time around.