> "Didn't I just take a cancer screen? What was the result?" “The result was ‘probably not,’ but the other option is ‘almost certainly not’ so we’d like to do

> "Didn't I just take a cancer screen? What was the result?" “The result was ‘probably not,’ but the other option is ‘almost certainly not’ so we’d like to do more tests to make sure.” (If the patient presses for more information, you don’t need to pull out the textbook yet; a simple analogy to explain why a cancer screen needs more tests might be by analogy to a rock screen, which sometimes catches clumps of dirt that need to be prodded a bit more to determine that they’re not actually stone.) The important bit is to present it as routine and not yet a cause for concern, to avoid causing excessive alarm.