Waiting Isn’t Wasted

What the in-between moments have taught us about patience, perspective, and hope.

6 min read

There’s a special kind of waiting that comes with cancer. It’s not the waiting in line at the grocery store. It’s not the kind you fill with your phone or a podcast. It’s the waiting for scan results, the waiting between treatments, the waiting to see if something is working, and sometimes simply the waiting to exhale.

Early on, we thought these stretches of time were just something to get through. They felt like uncomfortable pauses on a long road, empty spaces between the things that actually mattered. But over time, we’ve learned that some of the most important lessons of this journey have come in those very spaces.

Waiting has a way of stripping away the noise and forcing you to focus on what really matters. It slows you down. It can soften you. And, if you’re willing, it can even teach you.

For us, it has meant learning to celebrate the ordinary and noticing the beauty in small things we might once have overlooked. It has meant leaning on each other more intentionally. It has meant learning, slowly and imperfectly, to trust a little more and control a little less.

None of that means we’ve learned to love waiting. We haven’t. Scan results still matter. Treatments still matter. The uncertainty is still real. There are still moments when we would gladly trade all that perspective for an answer right now.

But we no longer see the waiting as wasted.

It isn’t simply empty space between appointments, treatments, scans, or decisions. Life is still happening there. Dinner still needs to be made. The dogs still need attention. Someone makes coffee. We laugh about something ridiculous. We make plans. We change plans. We sit together. We get up the next morning and begin again.

That may be one of the most important things cancer has taught us about the time between the big moments: the in-between isn't where we're waiting for life to resume. It's where life is happening.

And maybe that is the point.

We may not get to choose how long we wait or what answer eventually arrives. But we can choose what we do with some of the time in between.

We still don’t love the waiting.

But we’re learning not to give it away.

You’re not alone in the waiting.

We see you. We get it. And we’re here.