August 2025 Archives

(This is part 12 in a series. Read the previous part here. New to the series? Start here.)

Anxiety is a difficult beast to deal with, and here I’d gone and put myself into a situation where anxiety had been able to have upper hand for the better part of three weeks. I hadn’t slept between the hours of 4am and 6am for weeks on end. I was tired. 

But I’ll start with the spoiler/punchline: we were at MGH a couple of weeks ago, four months after the last visit, and—thank God!—things are and have been stable for the past three years. Heidi had her ten year cancerversary in February, too!! As you can tell from the date of this writing (August, 2025), it’s been a long time since the last update (November, 2022). And in the intervening ≈3 years, we’ve moved to South Carolina, so visits to Boston to MGH are a bit more involved than just driving east on the Mass Pike. We usually take the short-visit approach—flying in the day before tests and visits, and flying out that evening. 

But this time, we started the journey just under three weeks before the visit with a business trip for me. No matter how well-planned and well-known the customer might be, these trips are always somewhat stressful, and this time it was quite a bit more stressful because I’m in a new job and am still learning by the ton—customers, products, places, and everything else. It’s a firehose of activity which challenges my memory, which is stressful. I returned home from that trip, and a day later Heidi and I started our travels together by going on a church retreat in the Sonoma Valley at a place just under two hours north of San Francisco. Unfamiliar as the place was, it was comfortable, but I never relaxed those days because the next stop on our trip was for the wedding of a friend in Connecticut.

That should not be a stressor in and of itself, except that I was the officiant! The wedding was to have been at our beach house in South Carolina, and I was to be the officiant. Objections from within the families required that the bride and groom make some heavy-duty and somewhat-last-minute adjustments to have it in Connecticut, and yet they still asked me to be the officiant. Though I was still quite honored to do so, my audience went from a dozen or so close relatives to about 140 people. A tad nervous? Sure. But that wasn’t the big reason for my nervousness: I wanted everything to be perfect, because, well, who wouldn’t? I was more nervous because there were a lot of places in the ceremony script (provided to me by the bride) which said, essentially, “riff here.”

Folks, I’m a layperson, not a priest, preacher, pastor or Biblical scholar, and so that caused a good deal of anxiety as I wrote, backspaced, copied, pasted, re-wrote, re-organized, seemingly ad infinitum. After all, I wanted it to be perfect. And, at some point, I got close enough to be happy with it, but then there was the actual stress of being the “star of the show” (other than the bride, of course!) for, what, 20 minutes? of the ceremony. Could I pull it off?

And then, after all that’s said and done, we had Scan Day at MGBH. I don’t care what planet you’re from, worrying about your wife’s cancer—especially if there have been events which have undoubtedly been stressful enough to cause her cancer to, I dunno’, re-bloom or something—is unavoidable.

So until the weekend between the rehearsal and the wedding, I’d been extraordinarily anxious, building from the mid-western sales trip, through the California church trip and the wedding, and culminating in worry about the Scan Day to come. But Mom—thank you, God, that she’s still around!—had some great advice for me, and it helped tremendously:

Mom talking:  The past few weeks are finished. You cannot rework any part of them – so pull yourself together and focus on the joy of the time at hand – ready to send a young couple into a marriage arrangement – seeing J – seeing W and listening to him – hopefully seeing O too – making a business trip to Endicott – being back in CT for a visit – these are all good things on your schedule – all manageable if you will think of today and not Thursday [scan day].  Thursday will get here as the sun and moon dictate… Heidi has been taking care of herself … live happily before the scans and not in dread of them.  Look forward to good results as you have been blessed to get …. Dreading the scans does not serve you well – being grateful that they are available will serve you well.  Get on the other side of this emotional event – He is holding you in the palm of His hand – no safer place to be.  

“Get thee behind me Satan.”  Push aside the negative thoughts…

Be calm and of good spirit. 

Not easy, but give it a try!

Her words—the internal sigh I let out as I read them—rang true. Of course, I’d heard them in one way, shape, form or another, but something about the way she said them was important this time, and I was also ready to hear, receive, and abide in the words. Nearly immediately, I was relieved of all anxiety and stress over the events to come. I was still a bit nervous—the usual as I’d experienced numerous times in my life before—but the anxiety was gone.

Of course, the ceremony went off without a hitch… wait, that’s not quite right. It went off perfectly with a hitch, and it turns out that in my “performance mode,” I perform pretty well. Everybody was happy—the bride especially, which is all that really mattered. But while that wasn’t the end of the stress, I was certainly glad that it was done and that was one more thing was off my plate.

And then the last thing to happen was our visit to MGH for another set of the periodic scans to see if Heidi’s cancer is stable. This particular visit was especially stressful because we had been led to believe that stress causes cancer, or causes cancer flareups, or… something. Because I changed jobs in April, all the stress associated with moving insurance has been a source for Heidi of the worst kind of stress, panic and helplessness in the face of bureaucracy. But when we got the results—STABLE!—we were told by Dr. Lin that she does not believe that stress would not be a precursor to changes in Heidi’s cancer. And, you know what? When Dr. Lin says a thing, you believe that thing.

The relief in the room was palpable. I’m an easy cry these days for some reason, and my eyes were a bit moist even as I was overjoyed because I had been stressed out about this visit for weeks. Add in on top of that the stress of the wedding and a trip, both of which should have been great except that I was an emotional train wreck, and it’s easy to see exactly why I might have been both delighted and relieved, and a little teary-eyed, all at once.

I slept all the way through the night that followed.

The moral of this story is not to plan vacations or other stressors prior to visits to MGH, but instead do it the other way around. In case you think that would be just for my sake, no. The change will be good for Heidi as well, she admitted. And so we have learned a life lesson. It took messing up a perfectly good vacation and wedding to learn it, but it was a good lesson, and the fun we did have along the way (which, yes, we did!) made it all worth it.

And I'm still sleeping all the way through the night. 😴