The All-Clear

This morning I'm with my wife at the breast screening clinic. It's purely routine stuff but one can't help feeling a little worried. My view is that it's simply not possible for us to suffer any further bad luck and I try to reassure my wife that nothing out of the ordinary will be discovered. I don't know what effect my reassurance has, but probably very little. As I sit waiting while my wife is prodded and poked I am struck by how basic the waiting area is.

My wife appears soon after and tells me the doctor who examined her didn't find anything suspicious. That in itself was reassuring. He wanted a mammogram doing just to be sure and it wasn't long before we were ushered to another waiting room in the breast scanning dept. 

I am drawn to the radiation warning signs and find myself worrying more about the number of roentgens my wife will receive and what percentage of her normal yearly dose she will receive. We didn't wait long before my wife was taken into a room containing some space-age looking equipment. Sat in the waiting room I could just make out some sounds of motors and beeps. I'd watched a This Morning special on breast awareness the other day with my wife so we both knew what to expect. I do hope we get the results today. The chap who has to look at the scans hadn't arrived yet so we had to wait. I think it's the waiting that's the worst part. It would be so much better if they told you there and then. After another short wait while a report was prepared, we were sent back to the waiting room we had come from to wait for the results. The waiting room was quite busy, some of the people being those who were with us at the start. It's all about waiting. One doctor to fifty patients. The maths is easy.

A radio plays out the local station KLFM. It's strangely out of place here. The tunes are jolly and I find it quite irritating and in a way disrespectful. The only other sounds are from the staff discussing their shifts and lunch breaks. Old worn magazines are flicked from page to page. They are out of date and their news known and digested countless times. But they will still be there next year, and probably the year after if they remain intact.

The waiting room is now quite full. They are playing Queen on the radio. So out of place for a breast clinic waiting room.

There is an air conditioning unit in the corner of the room. It looks like a poor attempt at a Dalek or cheap space alien. It has pipe sticking out of it at all angles with a large pipe forced through a window to the outside. It looks as if it's been added by someone in haste who can no longer endure the oppressive hospital heat and has been forced through desperation to construct this monstrosity. I imagine it is as loud as it looks though I wouldn't want to be around when it is switched on.

It's finally my wife's turn and her name is called. She disappears into a side room and I begin to think how I will react if she is given bad news. How will we manage and can I give her the support she needs? In less than a minute, my wife reappears. It’s good news, all clear. Nothing suspicious was detected. What a relief… Instead of the anguish if we’d had bad news, we joked about how the mammogram required her breasts to be squashed almost flat for the machine to get a good enough image. It was good that we could relax and joke. We are lucky and I feel for anyone who cannot, for there are sadly too many…