The Diagnosis, and the Notebook I Filled Waiting for Answers

The doctor said the word “shadow” about a scan, told Tom not to worry yet, and booked him in for more tests in eleven days. Eleven days. Tom describes that stretch as the longest of his life — a waiting room with no chairs, just his own spiraling mind.

He’d never journaled before. He started because he had to put the 3am thoughts somewhere other than in bed next to his sleeping wife.

When the mind won’t stop rehearsing

Uncertainty is its own kind of pain. The body braces for a threat it can’t see, so the mind invents versions of it, over and over. Tom’s first entries were pure catastrophe — funerals, his kids, worst cases in high definition.

But something happened when he wrote them down. The fears got smaller on the page. In his head they were an infinite loop. On paper they were a finite list — scary, but countable. And a countable fear is one you can actually look at.

• I keep planning my own funeral. I need to stop doing this at 3am.
• Told the kids nothing. Watched them eat cereal and nearly lost it.
• Googled the symptoms again. Promised myself I’d stop. Won’t.

Sorting what he could control

A friend who’d been through cancer gave him one piece of advice, and Tom turned it into a nightly journal ritual: two columns. What I can control. What I can’t.

Can’t control: the scan result, the timeline, the biology. Can control: showing up to the tests, what I eat tonight, whether I’m present with the kids today instead of somewhere in the future that may never come.

Every night he moved his worries into the right column. It didn’t remove the fear. But it kept the fear from eating the days he still had, right now, regardless of any result.

I couldn’t control the shadow on the scan. I could control whether I missed my son’s whole week living inside my own head.

The waiting, made survivable

The journal became a way to actually pass the eleven days instead of just enduring them. He wrote down the ordinary things he was still able to do — a walk, a good meal, a real laugh at something dumb on TV — as proof that life was continuing even while suspended.

When the follow-up finally came, the news was good; the shadow was benign. But Tom says the notebook would have mattered either way. It had taught him how to stand inside uncertainty without being swept off his feet.

If you’re in the waiting room

Whether it’s your health or a loved one’s, what helped Tom:

1. Get the 3am thoughts out of your body and onto the page. They shrink when they’re written.
2. Use the two-column ritual. Sort each fear into can-control and can’t-control. Act only on the first.
3. Log the ordinary good. Walks, meals, laughs. Proof that now is still happening.
4. Don’t journal to reach a conclusion. Journal to get through the day you’re in.

Tom still keeps that notebook, even though the scare passed. He says it’s a reminder of two things: how fragile it all is, and how much steadier he can be than he’d ever have guessed — as long as he has somewhere honest to put the fear.

How Reverie helps you through the waiting

Tom’s two-column ritual — what I can and can’t control — is exactly the kind of structured reflection Reverie makes easy. When a health scare turns time into a waiting room, Reverie gives the 3am thoughts somewhere to go and helps you sort each fear into what you can act on and what you can only release. As an AI journaling app that remembers, Reverie also helps you log the ordinary good still happening around you — the proof that life continues even while suspended.