The FINAL final lab results came back from the surgery this past week, just before Thanksgiving. Yesterday, we had the post-surgical followup when we could ask for clarification on what those results mean. Let me try to put this in real-world terms.
I’ve got cancer, but for the purposes of this analogy, let’s say I’ve got bad fiction. One of the things I’ve been hoping for is that my particular type of bad fiction is a standalone awful novel. The Bridges of Madison County, for example. Or Ulysses. It’s been decades since I finished my degree in English Lit and I still have the occasional final-exam-nightmare featuring the incomprehensible drivel that is James Joyce.
Unfortunately, the final lab tests have denied me my hope. I’ve got the kind of bad fiction that is statistically likely to spawn a sequel. It’s not Ulysses. It’s Fifty Shades of Gray.
The cellular data points to a kind of cancer that often returns, and the related stats are 80/20. Eighty percent of the people who have this cancer once will go through treatment and get it again, within five years, most likely in the abdomen or in the lungs. But twenty percent of the people who have this cancer once will go through treatment and it never comes back.
This math is reframing my thoughts about the journey that lies ahead. I must go through chemo and radiation this time in order to try and eradicate whatever cancer might be left. But I must also, simultaneously, accept the possibility that this cancer will return, that it is likely to return – and, if that happens, I will have to go through treatment again.
I find myself looking backwards over the arc of my life with Crohn’s Disease. I’ve had it since I was 5 but I wasn’t diagnosed till my mid-twenties, mainly because my parents refused to believe there was anything physically wrong with me. I managed the symptoms on my own by curtailing food and megadosing on Pepto Bismol, but I felt alone. Then I met my husband, we moved to Boston, and a crisis in the E.R. led to that eureka moment. It was bittersweet, it was a fork in the road, it was a flash fire that burned through all my assumptions about the past and the future.
This moment now feels like that moment again, reframed. In an absolutely bizarre sort of way, my experience with Crohn’s is starting to feel like practice for this new battle. Is it possible – is it fruitful – to think of cancer like a potentially chronic illness?
Don’t get me wrong: I want to be among the twenty percent. I’ve been within the numerical minority so many times in the past when it comes to medical things, all for the worse. It would be serendipity if it happened again, but in my favor. That would be glorious.
But if I’m not, if I’m going to revisit this nemesis again, then I must prepare. I must think about this current situation as a different kind of learning experience. That’s going to take some extra effort, mentally, on my part – but I think I’m equal to it.
medicinal sausage 