The Six-Week Waiting Game

The Six-Week Waiting Game

🌼 Date: Thursday, May 7, 2026

⚡ Energy: Laundry, impatience, and mild medical portal side-eye

❤️‍🩹 Status: Waiting for answers like it’s my full-time job

🤨 Outlook: Hopeful, but one “wait 4–6 weeks” away from becoming feral

Yesterday was not exactly an action-packed episode of Tiny Tina: Cancerland Edition.

There were no dramatic appointments.

No major medical procedures.

No new alarming skin adventures.

No surprise side quests involving lotion, radiation, antibiotics, or my body choosing violence before breakfast.

I mostly stayed home and did laundry.

Which sounds boring, but honestly? At this point, boring is underrated.

Boring means I was not sitting in a waiting room.

Boring means nobody was poking me, scanning me, measuring me, radiating me, or asking me to rate my pain on a scale from 1 to “ma’am, why are you still standing?”

Boring means the house got some attention and I got to pretend, briefly, that my life is normal.

And then, of course, MyChart entered the chat.

Because apparently even on a laundry day, the medical circus likes to send a little confetti cannon through the patient portal.

I got a message back from my rheumatologist about going back on one of the medications I had to stop before starting chemotherapy.

For those keeping track at home — and honestly, someone should be, because I am tired — I had to stop certain meds before chemo because cancer treatment apparently likes to walk into your already complicated body and say, “Everyone out. I’m redecorating.”

So now that chemo is done and radiation is done, I am trying to figure out when I can restart the medication that helps keep my body from acting like a haunted house with joint pain.

My rheumatologist responded and asked when my last radiation treatment was.

And listen.

I am sure there is a reasonable medical-system explanation for this.

I am sure there are charts and tabs and portals and notes and departments and seventeen places where information might be hiding like it owes somebody money.

But from my little outsider patient perspective?

Isn’t that information in my chart?

The same chart you had to access to read my message and respond to me?

The chart that contains my appointments, treatments, labs, scans, medications, allergic reactions, probably my blood type, and possibly the exact moment I lost my will to sit in another waiting room?

Again, I am not saying I know how the system works.

I am just saying that from this side of the screen, sometimes it feels like I am the only one carrying the full binder of Tina: The Medical Miniseries.

And I don’t even have a binder.

I have chemo brain, screenshots, random notes, and the emotional stability of a raccoon holding a cupcake in traffic.

So yes, I answered the question.

But I also had a tiny internal moment of:

“Ma’am. Please check the file labeled: All The Things That Have Been Happening To Me Since November.”

Now I am waiting for the actual answer.

And I am really, really hoping the answer is not:

“You need to wait 4–6 weeks after your final radiation treatment before restarting it.”

Because apparently 4–6 weeks is the magic number for everything in Cancerland.

Need to recover from surgery before chemo?

Six weeks.

Need to wait before starting radiation?

Six weeks.

Need your body to heal?

Six weeks.

Need your skin to stop acting like it joined a rebellion?

Give it time.

Need your immune system to stop being dramatic?

Probably six weeks.

Need your soul to re-enter your body?

Please allow 4–6 business weeks.

I swear, at this point, “4–6 weeks” is less of a medical timeline and more of a lifestyle brand.

And I am over it.

Because this patient has no patience.

None.

Zero.

Fresh out.

Backordered.

Unavailable until further notice.

Which, naturally, will take 4–6 weeks.

The hard part is that I understand why waiting matters.

I really do.

I understand healing takes time.

I understand medication decisions are not the same as picking a nail polish color.

I understand my body has been through surgery, chemo, radiation, allergic reactions, infections, nausea, fatigue, and whatever the hell category “Greased Pig Phase” falls under.

I understand that doctors are trying to avoid making one problem better while accidentally lighting another problem on fire.

I get it.

But understanding something does not magically make me less annoyed.

That is an important distinction.

You can understand the reason and still want to throw a slipper.

You can respect the process and still be tired of being processed.

You can appreciate medical caution and still sit there thinking, For the love of all things pink and caffeinated, can one thing just move forward already?

Because this part of the journey is sneaky.

The active treatment part is hard in a very obvious way.

Surgery is hard.

Chemo is hard.

Radiation is hard.

Everybody understands those words.

But the in-between waiting?

That’s a whole different kind of hard.

The waiting does not look dramatic from the outside.

You are not hooked up to an infusion pump.

You are not lying under a radiation machine doing the Breathing Olympics.

You are not coming home with fresh surgical drains or trying to figure out how to sleep without accidentally angering your entire torso.

You are just waiting.

Waiting for messages.

Waiting for instructions.

Waiting for your skin to heal.

Waiting for your energy to come back.

Waiting for nausea to calm down.

Waiting for your immune system to stop being a diva.

Waiting to restart medications.

Waiting to feel like your body belongs to you again.

Waiting to stop being “in recovery” and start being “in my actual life.”

And somehow, that waiting can feel just as exhausting as the big medical stuff.

Because at least during treatment, there was a schedule.

A plan.

A next step.

A box to check.

Now it feels like I keep standing at the edge of the next chapter, but every time I try to step forward, someone pops out with a clipboard and says, “Not yet, Tina. Let’s give it 4–6 weeks.”

No thank you.

I would like to speak to the manager of Time.

Yesterday, while I was doing laundry, I kept thinking about how weird it is to be living this almost-normal life while still very much being tangled in cancer recovery.

I am folding clothes.

Answering messages.

Checking the portal.

Thinking about medications.

Wondering what my body is doing.

Trying not to spiral.

Trying to be patient.

Trying not to eat my feelings, because half the time my stomach is still like, “Absolutely not.”

It is such a strange mix of ordinary and overwhelming.

A laundry basket on the bed.

A medical question in my inbox.

A normal chore.

A not-normal life.

And there I am in the middle of it, trying to remember if I washed the darks, when my last radiation appointment was, and whether I am emotionally prepared for another doctor to tell me to wait.

Spoiler alert:

I am not.

But I will.

Because that is what this whole thing keeps teaching me.

I can be annoyed and still keep going.

I can be impatient and still follow instructions.

Mostly.

I can grumble at MyChart and still answer the message.

I can roll my eyes at the six-week magic number and still understand that my body needs time.

I can be grateful and irritated in the exact same breath.

That might actually be my current specialty.

So now I wait.

Again.

For the rheumatologist to tell me what the next step is.

Maybe I will get lucky and the answer will be, “Yes, Tina, you can restart it now.”

Maybe the answer will be, “Let’s check with oncology first.”

Maybe the answer will be the dreaded 4–6 weeks, and I will have to practice my breathing exercises for a completely different reason.

Either way, I am still here.

Still healing.

Still doing laundry.

Still waiting.

Still sending messages.

Still trying to be the tiniest bit patient, even though patience and I are not currently on speaking terms.

And if the medical world could maybe pick a new magic number besides six weeks, that would be great.

I vote for six minutes.

Or six snacks.

Or six uninterrupted hours where nobody asks me a question that is already in my chart.

But until then, I will keep checking the portal, folding the laundry, and trying not to become feral in the comments section of MyChart.

Growth, people.

That’s growth.

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One Badass Day at a Time