Waiting for the doctor....

The day I had my MRI done, my opthalmologist had a full schedule, but he skipped lunch to run over to the hospital and look at my MRI films himself. Helps when you work for the doctor.
But after lunch, I knew something was up and he was too busy with scheduled patients to talk to his employee patient.
Now, standard practice of our local hospital is to fas copies of test results to our office and then we would match them with the patient's file and put them in place for the doctor to see. Usually, I did this just because other people forgot to do it on days when we were busy and it needed to be done every day. So, it was about 2 p.m. when I decided to check the fax machine.
In all honesty, I suspected my MRI results would be there and I was waiting rather anxiously for them. The rediologist who reads the MRIs does not officially diagnosis you with MS. Officially, even with lesions present, it isn't a confirmed diagnosis until you get the results from a lumbar puncture, the new modern terminology for a spinal tap. But what radiologists do say is that the MRI showed several suspicious lesions, four in all, consistent with white matter scarring...hell, I don't remember the exact mumbo jumbo but the short version is: consistent with multiple sclerosis.
I think my hand was shaking when I read it. I know I was crying a few minutes later when I asked my supervisor if I could take a little break. She was confused until she saw the test results in my hand. Then, she let me leave the building.
I went to the picnic tablebehind the building and just sat there to cry. I'm not sure how long I had been out there when I heard my doctor yelling. "How could you just let her read it herself? I would have told her..."
Then the door opened and he was there, sitting with me at the table, telling me that this was not the end of life as I knew it. Ha! What the hell did he know? It's not like he was the one being sentenced to a slow, crippling disease. If I was lucky it would be slow, right?
It's funny how logic seeps in later, even if you can't hear it, can't bear to understand it when you first are told something.
"We see patients in here every day that have MS and you would never know it," he told me. "I know college professors and doctors who have MS and it is not a death sentence."
I wasn't worried about the death sentence to be honest. I was more scared, still am, if the truth be told, of a crippling sentence. But he assured me that too was only one of the things that could happen. It did not have to be.
He spent probably 20 minutes with me, calming me down enough that I could go back to work. After he was doen with patients, we looked at my MRI films and compared them to the ones from three years earlier. On the new ones, I could clearly see the lesions. On the first ones, there were not even any shadows, so as much as I wanted to blame them for missing it the first time, the truth was we didn't do enough tests to catch my MS the first time I had symptoms.
I called my husband once I calmed down a smidge and managed to say the words for the first time. I don't think I said them again out loud for months. By the time I got home, he had been on line and had an action plan. He knew what the recommended treatments were and how the disease progresses. To this day, I think he may have a better understanding of it than I do.
He didn't coddle me that day and I think that's a good thing. If he had been too nice, I would have fallen apart. Instead, he, like my doctor, was matter of fact: This is what you have and this is how we fight it.