Jae L. Ross, Assistant Attending Psychologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Assistant Professor of Psychology in Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“The urgency to have cancer removed immediately is one of the most consistent patient experiences I’ve witnessed; it’s also one of the least discussed. This week’s newsletter sits with the structural mismatch underneath that urgency.
‘I Want It Out!’
A Test of Patience
Impatience is a feeling most of us know well.
Stuck in traffic when you need to be somewhere. Waiting in a long line when you have other things to do. Watching the phone for an important call that hasn’t come yet.
The wanting of something to happen faster than it is.
Most of us learn to live with these moments. They soon pass.
But when cancer enters your life, impatience rises to a level few have experienced before.
There is an alien threat inside your body that shouldn’t be there. Every part of you wants it gone, now! And understandably, a cry arises from deep inside:
I want it out!
I’ve heard it a thousand times. I wish they could just cut it out. I wish the tumor was shrinking faster. Why can’t they tell me more? How much longer? What’s taking so long?
This doesn’t come from weakness. It’s wisdom from a nervous system that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to respond to threat by acting immediately. Fight. Flee. Restore safety. That’s the design. The urgency you feel is the urgency of a survival system doing what it was built to do.
But cancer treatment doesn’t move at the speed the system wants. It requires the exact opposite.
Where the nervous system says move, treatment says wait. Where the body says now, treatment says when the next step is ready. Where every cell says do something now, treatment offers the slow work of biopsies, staging, rounds of medicine that come weeks apart, scans that measure response, decisions about what comes next.
The nervous system is designed for immediate action. Cancer treatment requires sustained inaction.
These two systems are fundamentally incompatible. And you’re caught between them.
So, your sleep becomes disrupted. You wake at three in the morning, and your first thought is the cancer. You try to read, to work, to be with the people you love – and your attention keeps returning to the same place. The threat is still inside you. The system that registered it is still sounding alarms.
This is understandable. Your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing what it has always done when something is wrong inside. The signal continues because the threat continues.
What you have little power to do is act on the urgency. The next step of treatment is the only thing that’s possible – and the next step is often nothing immediate. Only more waiting.
This is what is meant by a test of patience.
Not the small patience that is tested while waiting for traffic to clear, or a line to move, or a call to eventually come. That patience is easier by comparison because what you’re waiting for isn’t life-threatening and resolves after a short while.
This is patience at a level you’ve not been asked for before. The thing you are waiting for isn’t small. The system that wants to act quickly can’t be quieted. The waiting isn’t days but months, and possibly years.
You’ve waited through other uncertainties in your life. You’ve stayed with things that took longer than you wanted. You already know something about how to wait, even when the body and mind protest. Cancer is asking that capacity to show up in a harder form than ever before.
Patience in this situation, when it can be brought, is often built from trust.
Trust in the willingness to lean on something while you wait.
Trust in the process that moves slower than you’d like, but is moving toward what you can’t move toward alone. Each step generates the information the next step requires.
Trust in the people on your team. They’ve spent careers learning to read cancer and how to treat it. You can’t possibly predict every outcome and know what to plan next. Your job is to show up for the steps that have been planned. Their job is to know what those steps are.
Trust in your faith, if you hold it. Some find a larger framework that holds them through uncertainty. Others do not. Neither is required.
And trust in yourself. The patience you’ve brought to other moments of waiting in your life is real. It’s a skill that’s part of you. It doesn’t disappear because the waiting is harder now.
This is what patience looks like in this moment.
You show up for the biopsy, wait for the results, and begin the first round of treatment. You return for the next one, and the one after that. You walk into the scan when it’s scheduled. You hear the report, absorb whatever it contains, and move toward whatever comes next.
And inside all of it, the wanting continues. The system still signals. The body still says move. The cry still rises in the private moments.
And still, you wait. You carry what you can. You lean on what holds you. Through the process. Step by step. Breath by breath.
Reflections on the inner psychological experience of living alongside cancer.”
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