The Same Boat

A person whom I had only met relatively recently, but with whom I had had a reasonable amount of in-depth conversations about all sorts of things, stunned me by telling me, eight months after we'd first met, that she had had breast cancer in the past. 

I wasn't stunned by the diagnosis, god knows at this stage it seems cancer in doctors is at epidemic proportions.

I was just amazed that in all the chats we had had about health and the future and the past, she had chosen to not disclose this. And when she told me, she was still quite uncomfortable, and we quickly moved on to another topic. 

Why was I so taken aback? I felt like she had done me a disservice by not buddying up with me and "sharing" in that saccharine way we have all come to expect from years of immersion in pseudo-psychology. I felt hurt that she had chosen to keep her personal private business to herself, and had decided to not harp on and on about it to anyone who would listen. 

Why should she tell me, just because I have cancer too? I don't go up to every 1999 Fiesta owner I see and start chatting about how great they are to park in tight spaces. I don't suddenly become best mates with anyone who ever went to Barcelona on holidays. So why should I be suddenly bonding with a relative stranger just because she was once an oncologist's patient too?

I know quite a few people with cancer who have no interest whatsoever in broadcasting this fact to the world at large. I have interacted with strangers online who have told me about their diagnosis, but in direct messages rather than on a public forum.  

I read this about David Bowie's death. It struck a chord. 

"he’s just bucked one of the most powerful and nauseating trends of our era: the victim-therapeutic complex which demands that we keep nothing private, that we advertise our failures and fragile mortality to a watching, sadness-hungry world."

It kind of shut me up.

Briefly.

Mum's Thumbs

Ross from Friends is a big fan of opposable thumbs, if I recall correctly. 

I don't really care if they are opposable, I just need them to not be covered in cracks and fissures.

My friendly monoclonal antibody, Vectibix, which is doing a sterling job of keeping my cancer at bay, is also busy wreaking havoc with my epidermis. I don't really even notice the pizza face any more, it has become the new me and it doesn't hurt like it used to, so it's not a big issue.

The banjaxed fingers, however, are a bloody curse.

For a moment, lets consider the kinds of things mums need intact digits for. 

Pressing pop fasteners on babygrows (no one knows how to spell that correctly).

Pulling up zips on baby sleeping bags.

Buttoning tiny buttons on tiny children's clothes.

Carseat/buggy/highchair strap buckling.

Texting (e.g. "come home now before I strangle one of them").

Chopping onions/garlic/chillies/lemons (in increasing order of OOUCHHHH when the juice seeps into the cracks).

Completing the cutesy craft homework the teacher so thoughtfully chose to send home, while the pupil is lounging in front of Paw Patrol.
Getting the plastic seal off a wine bottle.
Prizing apart vital Lego bits.
Constructing scale models of Anfield with approximately 50 million miniscule styrofoam components (not that I am ungrateful for the very thoughtful Christmas present...)
Typing grievances onto the interweb, looking for cyber sympathy.

Small trials I know, but surprisingly trialsome. 

God help me if I had something to really complain about.

Above Average

I lied.

I have said in the past that I don't pay any attention to statistics. That I don't look up survival stats. That I ignore the numbers. This is not true.

In the few weeks after my diagnosis, I remember googling colon cancer on my phone while sitting in a dark bedroom putting my baby to sleep. Turns out that's not the most relaxing thing to do (who would have thunk it).

I do at least have the sense to filter out the studies that I don't fancy the results of, and instead just read the ones with the outcomes that suit me. 

One that stuck in my head gave an average life expectancy after diagnosis of stage 4 colon cancer of 13 months. 

It was the range of this one I liked - one patient lived a month, another lived 90 months.

(90 months is 7 and a half years. Saved you some brainjuice there).

I always fancied myself as an outlier, a bit out of the ordinary, certainly not average. And never mean.

Statistics have troubled me long before they were a life-and-death situation for me. I studied them on at least three separate occasions in college, and each time it was like I'd mistakenly signed up for Ancient Japanese 101.  Total brain freeze when it comes to chi-squared tests and, erm, the other stuff. I struggle with the basics like mean, mode and median. Every single time I see or use one of those terms, I have to start from the beginning, figuring out which one is the one which is in the middle, which one is the average one, which one is the one with the most ones in it.*

And when it comes down to it, how useful are averages or means to me now? The Means to An End that actually nobody can predict with anything even remotely approaching accuracy. I could have been the one month person. I certainly aim to beat the 90 month fella (why bother being better than average if you don't want to WIN!)

But I am now alive, when according to these statistics half of the people who were diagnosed on the same day as me are tucked up in their coffins, or sneezing in their urns. 

Bad luck, chums. 

I'm happier to be on the right side of the curve that is levelling off inexorably to zero. I am going to be that skew-er that everyone tries to rub out with confounding variables. 

Confound them, I say. 




*More useful educational stuff - don't say I don't help you out.