Walls in the Waiting Room

Friday I had my annual mammogram.  Since 2008, I have been on a mammo-roller coaster with several years of "call backs" for more images, three recent years of all clear and no "call backs" , and various friends diagnosed with breast cancer (one death) in between. 

As I sat in my gown in the waiting room (and it was an unusually long wait for this location), I watched the women around me, also waiting.  One was busy doing paperwork on her lap, another was flipping through a magazine and sneezing.  I, too, had a magazine in front of me but I was feeling overwhelmed with my anxiety and my fears for these women, too. 

I have been reading about suffering and the Buddhist practice of tonglen.  As I reflect on it now, I realize I was breathing in their anxieties, holding it in and letting it out with love--or trying to.  But somewhere in my breathe, the transformation of suffering to love got stuck.  Only fear remained in my body.  I am new at this practice and did it imperfectly.  But I tried.

(As I described this experience to a friend today she said, "we live within our walls in doctors' waiting rooms" and this struck me as a title for this blog post.)

Later, in the imaging room, I commented on how busy the office seemed--unusually so.  The tech shared that "we've been really busy since the Affordable Care Act went into effect.  We are seeing women who haven't seen a doctor for years and have been living with growing breast lumps."  I felt both saddened and grateful for the fact that women are now getting healthcare--but to wait because of the lack of it seem horrible to me and a failure of our country.

Whatever comes my way from my mammo this year, I am one of the fortunate women to have had health insurance all my life and good doctors to help hold me up through my health challenges.  I plan to buy flowers (tulips are my favorite) to take to the lobby and ask staff to distribute to women taking their mammos that day.  In a small way, I want to cut a crack in the walls in the waiting room.