If there’s one thing I know about being a cancer survivor, it’s this: you can survive cancer, but you can never really get past it.

Last week I had an ultrasound of my thyroid/neck area, which is something my endocrinologist orders yearly. It’s not a big deal- as tests go, ultrasounds are the quickest, easiest, and least painful. No one’s sticking a needle in you (blood test, biopsy), and you don’t have to lie inside a tube with what sounds like all of Snow White’s dwarf miners hammering on the outside (MRI). Unfortunately, this time, the ultrasound results were questionable, and now I’m going to have an MRI for sure, and possibly a biopsy.

The chances are very, very small that anything’s actually wrong with me. My last blood test results were perfect, and I feel strong and healthy (though, as I well know, it’s possible to feel healthy and have cancer). The questionable lymph node has been fluctuating in size for years; it just happens to be on the larger end right now. It could easily be larger because I had allergies that day, or my immune system was fighting off something. But since my endocrinologist is very, very cautious (a good thing, yet it results in situations like this), she wants to keep testing me for the possibility that I have lymphoma.

While 98% of my brain is telling me that this is no big deal, just another test out of hundreds, it’s still a big source of anxiety. It brings back a lot of emotions from 14+ years ago. It’s like the cancer time of my life is reaching out and sucking me back in, if only briefly, if only until I get the phone call from my doctor saying, “Everything’s fine, we’ll check again in six months.”

And of course, the stakes are higher now. I have a ten-month-old son. If I do have to go through cancer again, it would impact my husband and family greatly, but at least they are adults, capable of understanding and dealing with their own emotions. Edwin will not understand if I am sick, if I am in the hospital, if I can’t take care of him. I know it’s not necessary to think about that yet. I know that there’s such a tiny chance that anything’s wrong.

But the 2% of myself that’s worried… she’s the one I’m listening to right now. She’s the one who remembers how it was before. She’s the one who fears how it could be again. She’s the one who knows that it’s never really over when they say it’s over.