The Follow-Up Scan

They call it scanxiety, the women in the online group. Kate had laughed the first time she read the word. It sounded like a breakfast cereal. It sounded like something you’d buy in a pharmacy, in a cheerful box.

She was not laughing now. She was sitting in the waiting room of the oncology department at 8:40 on a Wednesday morning, one year to the day since her last treatment, holding a paper cup of water she had not drunk, waiting to be told whether she was still well.

The waiting room was exactly as she remembered it. The same pale-blue chairs bolted together in rows. The same fish tank in the corner with the same bored orange fish, or perhaps its successor. The same rack of magazines from three years ago, offering celebrity weddings that had since become celebrity divorces. The same smell of hand sanitiser and instant coffee and something else, underneath, that she had never been able to name and had smelt in her dreams for months afterwards.

Across from her sat a woman in a headscarf with a paperback held very close to her face, not turning the pages. Next to her, a man of about seventy holding his wife’s hand so tightly his knuckles were white, while she patted his arm and told him, in a low voice, about a neighbour’s dog. Kate recognised all of it. The not-reading. The holding on. The talking about anything except the thing.

A year ago she had walked out of these doors with her hair gone and her eyebrows gone and a little bell in her hand that the nurses gave you to ring at the end of your last treatment. She had rung it so hard the nurse laughed and said she’d frighten the fish. Her husband Tom had cried in the car park. Her daughter, who was twelve, had made a banner that said MUM BEAT IT in silver glitter, and hung it in the kitchen, and Kate had not had the heart to tell her that it didn’t quite work like that. That you didn’t beat it, exactly. You got through the treatment, and then you came back every three months, then every six, and sat in the blue chairs, and waited to hear whether it had decided to come back too.

Her hair had grown in curly. That was the strangest thing. Forty-four years of straight brown hair, and it had come back in tight dark curls, as if her body had decided that if it was going to start again, it might as well try something new. Her daughter loved it. Kate still startled sometimes, catching her reflection in a shop window. Who is that?

The scan itself had been on Monday. Twenty minutes in the machine, lying very still, thinking about anything else. Groceries. The broken gutter. The way her daughter said “literally” in every sentence now. And under all of it, like a radio left on in another room, the question.

Now she was here for the results.

Tom had offered to come. She had said no. She had told him it was fine, it was routine, it would be quick, he should go to work. The truth was she couldn’t bear his face. He was so bad at hiding things. If the news was bad, she wanted thirty seconds alone with it before she had to see it in his eyes.

She checked her phone. 8:52. Her appointment had been at 8:45.

She went through the list, the way she did at night. If it was clear: she would go home, and make pancakes, even though it was a Wednesday, and call her sister. If it wasn’t clear: she would ask the doctor exactly what it meant, write it down, and not cry until she was in the car. She had done it before. She knew how. She would find out what the next step was. She would do the next step.

Last month a woman in the online group had posted that her scan was clear. Two hundred comments, all hearts and exclamation marks. The week before, another woman had posted that hers was not. Two hundred comments then, too. Kate had written to both of them. She had meant every word.

“Katherine Morris?”

She stood up too fast. The water slopped over the edge of the paper cup onto her shoe.

Dr. Anand was waiting at the door of the consulting room. He had treated her for eighteen months. She had seen him at her worst — bald, grey, vomiting into a bucket, furious at the universe and, briefly, at him. He had a habit, she had learned, of telling you the news before you’d even sat down, because he said that the walk from the door to the chair was the cruellest distance in medicine.

He was smiling.

That was all. He was smiling, and before she reached the chair he said, “It’s clear, Kate. Everything is clear.”

She sat down. She did not cry. She had expected to cry. Instead she began to laugh — a strange, helpless, hiccupping laugh that came up from somewhere deep in her chest, from the place where she had been holding her breath for three months, and would hold it again for the next six, and the six after that. Dr. Anand passed her a box of tissues anyway, from long experience, and waited.

He went through the report with her. She heard almost none of it. Words floated past — no evidence, stable, very pleased — and she caught them and held them like a child catching soap bubbles.

“See you in six months,” he said at the door.

“See you in six months,” she said, and it sounded like a promise, and like a threat, and like the most ordinary sentence in the world.

In the waiting room, the woman in the headscarf looked up from her paperback. Their eyes met. Kate didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The woman gave her a small nod, and something in her face loosened, as if Kate’s news had made a little room in the air for hers.

Kate walked out through the sliding doors into a bright, cold morning. She stood in the car park and called Tom, and he answered on the first ring, which meant he had been holding his phone the whole time.

“It’s clear,” she said.

She heard him put the phone down on his desk. She heard a sound like a chair being pushed back very fast. Then she heard, faint and far away, a whole office of strangers begin to clap.

She drove home and made pancakes. It was a Wednesday. Nobody minded.