There is a particular kind of stillness that settles in after a Saturday MRI, a stillness that stretches across the weekend and follows you into Monday morning. The appointment itself is behind you, the machine already fading into memory, yet the body remembers. The mind remembers. The anxiety that softened for a moment begins to rise again, slow and familiar, like a tide you hoped would stay low.
Saturday held its own kind of tenderness. After the scan, instead of heading straight home, Steve and I picked up breakfast sandwiches near the Towers. The air was warm, the kind of early warmth that wraps itself around you gently, and we walked to the seawall with the sun already beginning to soften the morning. We found a spot to sit, unwrapped our sandwiches, and let the world open around us. The ocean shimmered, the waves moved with their patient rhythm, and for a little while we simply sat there, eating quietly, marveling at the beauty in front of us. It felt like the kind of moment that asks you to pause, to breathe, to remember that life is still wide and generous even when fear tries to narrow it.
After we finished eating, we lingered, letting the warmth settle into our shoulders. When we finally got back into the Jeep, we took the top off and let the sun spill in. The drive became its own kind of medicine, wind in our hair, sunlight on our skin, the road stretching ahead without urgency. We drove without a plan, letting the day guide us, letting the warmth loosen what the MRI had tightened.
Eventually we ended up at Blu on the Water for lunch and cocktails, the sun still bright, the breeze soft, the morning’s sharpness dissolving into something gentler. There is a kind of healing that happens in moments like that, quiet and unforced, the kind that reminds you that fear is only one piece of the mosaic.
And then Monday arrives.
The mind wakes before the body, already whispering, check the portal. We have grown so accustomed to quick results, to the reassurance of seeing words and numbers appear in MyChart, that the absence of information becomes its own kind of noise. When the results do not show up as quickly as they usually do, the imagination fills the silence with worry. The fear seeps back in, slow and steady, as if it had been waiting for the smallest crack.
But the truth is simple, even if the body struggles to believe it. The silence does not mean something is wrong. The delay does not mean danger. The waiting is not a verdict.
Sometimes the radiologist is backed up. Sometimes the system is slow. Sometimes the world is simply moving at its own pace, not ours.
So today, I am reminding myself gently that the absence of results is not the presence of bad news. I am choosing to return to the moments that held me on Saturday, the warm air, the steady footsteps, the sunlight pouring into the Jeep, the ocean shimmering beside us, the comfort of Steve’s presence, the way he knows how to turn a hard morning into something softer.
These are the pieces of stained glass I gather on days like this, the fear, yes, but also the hope, the worry, yes, but also the light, the silence, yes, but also the memory of being held by something larger than my anxiety.
This window I am building is made of all of it, every shard and shimmer, every pause and breath, every moment of waiting and every moment of release.
Waiting has its own language,
quiet and uncertain,
echoing old fears.
But silence is only a pause,
not a prophecy,
not a shadow of what is to come.
Light still gathers in the in between,
and I am learning to trust it,
one breath at a time.
-Nelia Maria LeClair
Today, the results came back: no evidence of suspicious mass, non‑mass enhancement, or secondary signs of malignancy in either breast. The tide has turned toward peace, and I feel the ocean exhale with me. Hope rises again; steady, luminous, and alive.
