Nobody who has ever had cancer, that's for sure. Or who has loved someone who had cancer. Or lost someone to cancer.
Today I found out that a friend who has been incredibly successful at surviving longer than medicine originally predicted he would may not be with us much longer...
I don't know why some of us get cancer and some do not, or why some who get cancer get to have a "curable" cancer and others do not. Or why good people die and bad people don't, or some people with children and grandchildren to love and watch grow die, and some do not. I have lost a beloved mentor to the same cancer I had, I have lost friends to the same cancer I had, and I don't know why I was able to survive it and they were not.
Everyone diagnosed with cancer, any cancer, is given their odds - odds of a cure, odds of survival, odds of recurrence. Odds. Statistics. Numbers. Numbers that may mean something, or may not. And you have a choice, fight the odds or believe that they dictate your future. Statistics may not reflect individual experience. Unless they do.
After my first biopsy in 2002, I was given excellent odds - very small chance that the atypical tissue they found would be breast cancer. Except that it was. Early stage, DCIS, but there it was. Once you have DCIS, you are at risk of getting it again. But not necessarily of getting invasive cancer. Unless you do. Which I did in 2007. Again, the odds of getting it were lower than the odds of not getting it, but the odds betrayed me. Now, I live with incredibly small odds of recurrence, and because I did everything I could to lower even those small odds, according to the medical understanding at the time, I work at training my brain not to worry about it.
I think most of us, when first diagnosed, feel hopeless. Maybe we believe the odds are too great. Maybe we consider the treatment too frightening. The future in front of us is suddenly uncertain, or we are just painfully aware of how uncertain the future really is. What if we can't beat it? What if we can? What if it comes back? What if it doesn't?
When my friend was first diagnosed, he almost didn't fight because he was told his odds of survival, even with treatment, were incredibly low. But then he decided to fight, for his kids, for his wife, for their future. Treatment made him so sick, he almost gave up. But then he didn't. And after months of chemo and radiation, he bought himself years of survival that the statistics said he would not have.
Some of us beat it, and some of us don't. There is no way to know which we will be. And beating it once doesn't mean it won't come back or that you will beat it again if it does. Some people who develop late stage or metastatic disease can enjoy long periods of remission after treatment, but not everyone. And nobody seems to be able to predict who will fall into which group.
For the patients and their loved one, this uncertainty can be unbearable. Or you find a way to bear it.
And then some other damn thing like an infection finds it's way in to your body because of the treatment that has been keeping you alive. And there it is. Suddenly you are losing the fight, and it's the fighting that makes you lose. You can follow all medical advice, and take every possible precaution, and there's nothing you can do to predict if or how it will happen. It ambushes you, it ambushes your family. All are powerless in the face of it. No matter how brave you are, or how determined, or how loved, or how worthy. Even knowing this a disease that can kill you, there is no way to really be prepared for losing the fight. It's maddening, maddening and heartbreaking.
It is heartbreaking knowing that the world is going to lose someone who is a good person, who has children and (soon) grandchildren to love and watch grow up, who has fought bravely and beaten horrible odds to live this long. Heartbreaking and infuriating. And unfair.
