The Waiting Room Inside Your Head: Learning to Live with Scanxiety

There’s a particular kind of dread that cancer survivors know intimately. It doesn’t announce itself with sirens or dramatic music. It creeps in quietly, sometimes weeks before an appointment, settling into your chest like a low-grade fever that won’t break.

It’s called scanxiety, and if you’ve experienced it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky.

Scanxiety is the anxiety that builds before, during, and after medical scans—the CTs, MRIs, PET scans, and blood draws that become the punctuation marks of a cancer survivor’s calendar. It’s the way my stomach drops when I see NYU Langone’s number on my phone. It’s lying perfectly still in the machine while my mind races through every worst-case scenario. It’s refreshing the patient portal seventeen times in an hour, waiting for results that will be a relief or change everything.

I wish I could tell you I’ve conquered it. I haven’t. What I’ve learned, instead, is how to run alongside it.

Here’s what nobody prepared me for after treatment ended: the scans don’t stop. The surveillance continues – every three months, then every six, then annually if you’re lucky. Each one is a referendum on your future. Each one asks the question you’re afraid to say out loud: Is it back?

The medical team calls this “monitoring.” Survivors have a different word for it.

We call it living in limbo.

I’ve stood on the starting line of over a hundred races. I’ve felt the pre-race nerves that make your hands shake and your mind spiral. But I’ll tell you something: the anxiety before an Ironman doesn’t come close to the anxiety before a scan. In a race, I have agency. I’ve trained. I can control my effort, my pacing, my nutrition. The outcome isn’t guaranteed, but it’s influenced by what I do.

Scanxiety is different. You can’t train your way out of it. You can’t outwork the results. You lie in the tube, hold your breath when they tell you to, and then you wait. The outcome is already determined—you just don’t know it yet.

That loss of control is what makes it so brutal.

So how do you manage something you can’t control? I don’t have a perfect answer, but I have a few practices that help me get through.

First, I name it. Scanxiety thrives in silence. When I pretend I’m fine, when I white-knuckle my way through the days before an appointment, the anxiety only grows. But when I say it out loud – to my wife, to a friend, to myself – something shifts. “I’m anxious about Thursday’s scan.”

That’s it. No explanation needed. No justification required. Just acknowledgment. Naming the thing doesn’t make it disappear, but it does make it smaller. It moves from the shadows into the light, where it’s easier to see for what it is.

Second, I shorten my time horizon. One of the hardest parts of scanxiety is the way it hijacks your future. Your mind leaps ahead—what if it’s bad news, what if I need more treatment, what will happen to my family, my work, my life? Before you know it, you’re living in a catastrophic future that doesn’t exist yet.

I’ve learned to pull myself back to today. Not next week. Not the appointment. Today. What’s in front of me right now? What can I do in the next hour? This is a practice I developed through endurance training – you don’t run a marathon by thinking about mile 26 at mile 3. You run the mile you’re in. The same principle applies here.

Third, I move my body. This might sound simplistic, but it’s not. Anxiety lives in the body as much as the mind. It’s the tight shoulders, the shallow breathing, the restless energy with nowhere to go. Physical movement – a run, a swim, even a walk around the block – gives that energy somewhere to go. It doesn’t solve anything, but it creates space. It reminds me that my body is still capable, still mine, still showing up.

Fourth, I let myself feel it. This is the one that took me the longest to learn. For years, I thought managing anxiety meant defeating it. Pushing through. Toughing it out. But scanxiety isn’t an opponent to beat. It’s a natural response to an unnatural situation. Of course you’re anxious – your health and your life have been threatened, and now you’re waiting to find out if the threat has returned.

That’s not weakness. That’s being human.

So I let it be there. I don’t fight it. I don’t pretend it away. I sit with it, acknowledge it, and keep moving anyway.

There’s a moment in every long race when you hit a wall. Your legs are heavy, your mind is telling you to quit, and the finish line feels impossibly far away. Experienced endurance athletes know that this moment isn’t the end – it’s just a passage. You don’t have to feel good to keep going. You just have to keep going.

Scanxiety is like that. It’s a wall you’ll hit again and again, as long as you’re fortunate enough to be alive and monitored. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to pretend it doesn’t affect you. You just have to find a way through and then keep going.

And here’s what I’ve learned on the other side of all those scans, all those waiting rooms, all those hours of uncertainty: the anxiety doesn’t define you. What defines you is what you do while carrying it.

You show up anyway. You live your life in the meantime. You refuse to let the fear of a possible future steal the reality of today.

That’s not courage. That’s just the work of being a survivor.

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