Waiting Rooms

The air is always cold and uncomfortable,
time, which the cancer is slowly stealing,
slips so silently away in this chamber
where you wait to have another test
to find out what degree the disease had spread.

Watching the families huddling together,
wrists of patients bearing that ivory hospital strip,
eyes strained in subdued stressed,
while relatives hold onto a hand or arm,
quietly trying to cling to another moment
of a life that they know is fragile and failing.

Mind goes through a thousand questions,
each ache and pain suppressed
so not to add to the brewing panic,
countless uncertainties paint the future,
what was important yesterday
is lost in this white room
that one spends in the endless seconds
before a nurse takes you for that IV injection
filled with that fluid that burns
as it goes through the veins
and then placed on a table,
which slides you through a long tube
with a machine photographing your body,
feeling so claustrophobic inside,
then looking up at that blue sky ceiling panel
in hopes it will calm the fear.

Afterwards returning to greet the family,
relieved this ordeal is over,
yet knowing in a week
the doctor will call to let you know
if the images give you days, months or years left.

Wandering that long hall towards daylight,
somehow seeing it means more
than you ever imagined.