Five Years Later, Uncertainty Still Visits

Five years later, a big medical test can still stop time. Everything narrows to one moment, one call, one set of results. Until then, you hold your breath and wait for the truth to arrive.

And the reason it still feels that way is simple: we’ve lived through all the fear and uncertainty of cancer. It was not an easy journey after my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. Her life quickly became measured in treatment plans, waiting rooms, lab results, and side effects that seemed to rewrite the rules day by day. She pushed through multiple sessions of chemotherapy, radiation, surgeries, and ongoing treatments with a strength that’s hard to put into words. On top of this, COVID hit while she was immunocompromised, and the fear spilled into everyday life. Even ordinary moments like grocery shopping or a simple interaction carry risk. The world didn’t just feel uncertain. It felt sharper and more dangerous. Each test result might indicate that everything is improving, or it could initiate another round of chemotherapy and alter your reality.

As the caregiver and partner, I learned something that doesn’t get said enough: the impact of cancer doesn’t only happen to the patient. Its impact ripples outward into people's closest relationships. It changes the tone of everyday conversations, the way you make plans, the way you hear a phone ring, the way you walk into a room. It can pull people closer with love and, at the same time, stretch everyone thin. You learn how to stay steady for the person you love most, while quietly carrying the sometimes suffocating fear that touches every part of your shared life. And you think the fear will fade over the years since the last treatment. But it doesn’t fade the way people assume it does. It just changes shape as it sits in uncertainty, awaiting the results of another test. Like today.

Today marks five years, and she went in for her tests. Uncertainty and fear returned. Once more, we held our breath, waited, and then the results came back. She’s still NED—No Evidence of Disease. Just like that... we finally exhaled.

That’s the moment people celebrate, and we do. But even now, every test still brings that pause. That familiar gap between “it’s probably okay” and “we know for sure.” Even when the results are good, the relief still arrives as a sigh, because part of you never forgets what it felt like to not know.

You don’t forget the marathon of treatments that got her to NED, or how hard she fought to get well and stay well. What she’s done to reach this point has been nothing short of spectacular. So it’s hard to believe that even five years later, on the day of a medical test, we still have to remind ourselves to breathe. The body remembers. The mind rewinds. Time slows down just long enough to let the old fear back into the room. And then we do what we’ve learned to do. We exhale, we keep going, and we let hope take up space again.

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If you’re walking through something like this too, you’re not alone, and it’s okay to be scared and hopeful at the same time. And if you ever want to talk with someone who understands that space between the test and the sigh, please reach out. No pressure, no fixing, no forced optimism. Just a real conversation, whenever you need it.