POST 20: “Inconclusive” — Because of Course It Was

If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been through the diagnostic wringer before. Sarcoidosis, the lymphoma scare, the radioactive dye adventure — I thought I’d seen it all. But the universe, ever creative, had a few new plot twists up its sleeve.

It started with a callback from my mammogram. Nothing alarming, just the soft-voiced nurse dropping “we’d like to schedule a diagnostic scan and an ultrasound” into my Tuesday like a small grenade. I wrote about that spiral already — the rage, the insurance math, the two-week panic attack disguised as functioning. What I didn’t write about was everything that happened after. The part where getting the actual answers turned into its own separate ordeal.

First up: the MRI.

I showed up on time, which felt like an accomplishment given everything. The receptionist was lovely — warm, patient, the kind of person who makes a medical facility feel almost human. We hit a small snag with my CareCredit card, the system was down, and we spent about twenty minutes troubleshooting while I assured her it was fine, I’d just pay with my debit card, no big deal. It genuinely wasn’t.

What was a big deal was the woman who appeared behind the receptionist mid-transaction, looked at my chart, and announced — to the receptionist, not to me, while I was standing right there — that since I was “late” I needed to fill out additional paperwork. The receptionist, bless her, explained I wasn’t late, we were dealing with a payment issue. The woman’s response: “make her fill it out anyway.”

I said nothing. I paid with my debit card, smiled at the receptionist, and took a seat.

Less than a minute later, the same woman called my name and walked me to the inner waiting area with the energy of someone I had personally wronged in a past life and who was continuing the grudge in this one. She asked me every question I’d already answered on my intake forms, and then, almost as an afterthought: “Do you have any foreign objects in your body?”

I mentioned my scleral buckle — an implant I got in 2020 after losing vision in my eye — noting I wasn’t sure if it counted but wanted to disclose it. She didn’t even blink. “We can’t see you today. Scleral buckles have metal in them and our radiologist won’t be able to proceed.”

I explained, calmly, that I’d had multiple MRIs since getting the buckle with no issues whatsoever. She was unmoved. So I tried a different angle: mine is silicone, I said, not metal — those older metal buckles haven’t been used in decades. Still unmoved. She wanted a serial number for the implant. I explained that silicone implants don’t have serial numbers. She looked at me like I was making that up.

And then — and I cannot stress enough that this actually happened — the radiologist came out and informed me that she had Googled scleral buckles and it said they contained metal.

She Googled it.

I Googled it too, right there, and found exactly what I’d told them: modern scleral buckles are silicone, the metal ones are a relic of medical history. I showed them the screen. The energy in the room did not change. I looked at the receptionist — still lovely, still the only functioning human in the building — handled my reschedule with grace and kindness while I pointedly ignored everyone else, and walked out.

I went to a different facility. They were wonderful, thorough, and apologetic — mostly because they had to attempt the IV for the contrast dye four or five times before they got it. By that point I had been poked, dismissed, Googled at, and inconvenienced across multiple zip codes in pursuit of answers, and I had simply run out of feelings about any of it.

Which is probably why, when the results finally came in, I received them with the emotional range of someone being told their Amazon package was delayed.

The nurse was kind, careful, clearly prepared to deliver news gently. She explained that the results were inconclusive — that some women have denser fatty tissue in their breasts that makes imaging difficult, that my bloodwork was completely fine, that they’d like to retest in a year. She kept it simple, avoided jargon, made sure I understood.

I said: “Okay. So next year then. Got it.”

That was it. Two weeks of white-knuckled waiting, one scleral buckle standoff, one Google battle with a radiologist, four attempts at an IV, and approximately six hundred dollars — all leading to: inconclusive, see you next year, your tissue is just dense.

I’d like to say I felt relief. I’d like to say something shifted, that I exhaled, that the weight lifted. But the truth is that by the time the answer arrived, my anxiety had already burned through every last fuck I had and quietly left the building. What I felt was closer to numbness than relief — not the peaceful kind, just the kind that happens when you’ve been running on adrenaline for two weeks and your system finally just… stops.

Sometimes that’s how it ends. Not with a revelation, not with tears of relief, not with a lesson neatly tied up in a bow. Sometimes you fight your way through the waiting and the bureaucracy and the woman with the Google degree, and the answer is just: we don’t know yet. Come back next year.

And you go home, feed your cats, and order takeout because you’ve earned it.

To everyone waiting on their own inconclusive results — I see you. The not-knowing is its own kind of exhausting, and there’s no gold star for how gracefully you carry it. You’re allowed to feel whatever you actually feel when the answer finally comes, even if what you feel is nothing at all.

That counts too.

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