The statistics of Cancer

I picked up Man’s search of meaning again recently. Actually it was gifted to me. In one of the initial chapters Victor Fankl writes about how Jews were reduced to some random numbers in the concentration camps. Who they were before, what were their names didn’t matter anymore. I am beginning to have a similar feeling post my diagnosis.

Doctors, journals, scientific articles are constantly trying to put a number to you. The chances of recurrence if this is positive and that negative, chances of survival under 40, 1 in 400 women aged 30 are likely to get breast cancer etc. etc. The list is endless. Everyone is trying to win the predicting game.

The sane cancer patient in me completely gets the importance of such numbers and how it all has come from researchers tirelessly trying to make sense of this disease all over the world. The not so sane one wants to scream my guts out. It will be two months since this mayhem started and with every passing day the only identity of mine that remains is of a cancer patient.

I am constantly between doctors/hospitals/medical journals which leaves me so exhausted that I have little time to do anything else. I am not permitted to go out alone. At max I can take walks here and there. There is so much paraphernalia attached with Cancer that most of my active time is spent in putting things in place.

I completely understand that it is just a phase, may be just a year. After a year I will be back on my feet like everyone else. Hopefully my life will be back to how it was. There is just one catch to it. Anyone who has read enough on cancer would know that it coming back is a good possibility. My recurrence chances post Chemo+Radiotherapy are 30%.(idiot stats!) There is a chance I will be back doing this dance again. There is also a slight chance that I may not live to do the dance again.

That is the nature of Cancer I guess. I want to coin the term “Family disease” for it. It just doesn't affect the patient but everyone around them. All I want right now is for life to go back to how it was. Where my family can go back to living their life and I have the space to do things that I absolutely love.

I am confident I will make sense of this mayhem and not reduce myself to some silly statistics.

A!