It was World Cancer Day this week. Did you see the news?
One in every two people will get cancer at some point in their lives.
Cancer Research UK says so. I've always thought it was one in three, but no, it seems that it's half of us.
Can that be true?? The mind boggles.
When I started writing this blog I thought that it might be interesting for others to hear what it's like to have cancer. It's not as if many people get to experience it. Not like blogging about, say, what it's like to be pregnant. Describing that would just be tedious. Self-indulgent. Who on earth wants to hear about my morning sickness?
But it turns out that your chances of, say, giving birth at some point in your life aren't quite as high as your chances of getting cancer.
(Although your risk factors are much more clearly defined, of course. Being male lowers your risk of pregnancy by, oh, about 100%.)
I find the new statistic extraordinary. I know loads and loads of people who have given birth. I don't think I know quite as many people who have had a cancer diagnosis.
(Although it's creeping up, my personal tally of people-I-know. Absolutely everyone, it seems, has an Auntie Ethel who had cancer, but quite a few people have now told me that they've had it themselves. And I had no idea. I might have known them for years, but I never knew about their cancer. Perhaps it's still a hidden thing, with people suffering in silence? Like having a miscarriage? When that happened to me (and I was as open about that devastation as I am about my cancer), I was absolutely flabbergasted to discover how very common the experience was. It seemed to be a similar statistic to one-in-two-people-get-cancer: about half of the mothers at the school gates, I'd say, nodded in sympathy, "Yes, me too." Who knew?)
It's an age thing, of course, not knowing quite as many people with cancer. Ask me again when I'm 96, and the chances are that people's pregnancies have faded from my memory and I'm wearing myself out visiting cancerous friends in hospital.
I've been thinking about statistics ever since that 90%-chance-of-survival figure I was given. So have others.
"Excellent!" has been the delighted comment from most family and friends. Some wish to take me up on my offer of detailed statistical explanations over coffee. But it isn't all as straightforward as it seems.
"I can do percentages," one friend wrote in an email, "but when I am a patient I can't." She continued:
"It is not the maths that defeats me but the emotional difficulty of imagining anything other than 100% alive, or 100% dead."
And that, of course, is exactly the problem. There is nothing in-between. It is not possible to be 90% alive, or to have half a cancer. Doctors often make treatment decisions based on statistics and population studies, but you are not a population. You are an individual. Studies on individuals tell you absolutely nothing about risk or chances.
So it's not much use, really, to know that cancer is going to happen to roughly half of the people in your office, on the bus, in the supermarket queue, in your daughter's classroom. You still won't know whether it's going to happen to you. If it does, it will happen 100%.
Then there is always the I could be knocked down by a bus argument. Even the consultant used it when she tried to put the statistics into context, explaining that you will never really know. "You could live to a hundred and I could be run over by a bus tonight."
We simply don't know what's around the corner, so there's no point speculating. Until I turn that corner, I'll consider myself 100% cancer-free.
There is one statistic, however, that is now crystal-clear and definite.
My chances of pregnancy were already dwindling with the onset of middle age, but with the cancer treatment frazzling everything in sight (eggs included), those chances have been firmly reduced to 0%.
I'm absolutely delighted that I was among the less-than-half-of-the-population to have given birth, but I consider it to be good news that on this front at least, there is no risk of recurrence.
One in every two people will get cancer at some point in their lives.
Cancer Research UK says so. I've always thought it was one in three, but no, it seems that it's half of us.
Can that be true?? The mind boggles.
When I started writing this blog I thought that it might be interesting for others to hear what it's like to have cancer. It's not as if many people get to experience it. Not like blogging about, say, what it's like to be pregnant. Describing that would just be tedious. Self-indulgent. Who on earth wants to hear about my morning sickness?
But it turns out that your chances of, say, giving birth at some point in your life aren't quite as high as your chances of getting cancer.
(Although your risk factors are much more clearly defined, of course. Being male lowers your risk of pregnancy by, oh, about 100%.)
I find the new statistic extraordinary. I know loads and loads of people who have given birth. I don't think I know quite as many people who have had a cancer diagnosis.
(Although it's creeping up, my personal tally of people-I-know. Absolutely everyone, it seems, has an Auntie Ethel who had cancer, but quite a few people have now told me that they've had it themselves. And I had no idea. I might have known them for years, but I never knew about their cancer. Perhaps it's still a hidden thing, with people suffering in silence? Like having a miscarriage? When that happened to me (and I was as open about that devastation as I am about my cancer), I was absolutely flabbergasted to discover how very common the experience was. It seemed to be a similar statistic to one-in-two-people-get-cancer: about half of the mothers at the school gates, I'd say, nodded in sympathy, "Yes, me too." Who knew?)
It's an age thing, of course, not knowing quite as many people with cancer. Ask me again when I'm 96, and the chances are that people's pregnancies have faded from my memory and I'm wearing myself out visiting cancerous friends in hospital.
I've been thinking about statistics ever since that 90%-chance-of-survival figure I was given. So have others.
"Excellent!" has been the delighted comment from most family and friends. Some wish to take me up on my offer of detailed statistical explanations over coffee. But it isn't all as straightforward as it seems.
"I can do percentages," one friend wrote in an email, "but when I am a patient I can't." She continued:
"It is not the maths that defeats me but the emotional difficulty of imagining anything other than 100% alive, or 100% dead."
And that, of course, is exactly the problem. There is nothing in-between. It is not possible to be 90% alive, or to have half a cancer. Doctors often make treatment decisions based on statistics and population studies, but you are not a population. You are an individual. Studies on individuals tell you absolutely nothing about risk or chances.
So it's not much use, really, to know that cancer is going to happen to roughly half of the people in your office, on the bus, in the supermarket queue, in your daughter's classroom. You still won't know whether it's going to happen to you. If it does, it will happen 100%.
Then there is always the I could be knocked down by a bus argument. Even the consultant used it when she tried to put the statistics into context, explaining that you will never really know. "You could live to a hundred and I could be run over by a bus tonight."
We simply don't know what's around the corner, so there's no point speculating. Until I turn that corner, I'll consider myself 100% cancer-free.
There is one statistic, however, that is now crystal-clear and definite.
My chances of pregnancy were already dwindling with the onset of middle age, but with the cancer treatment frazzling everything in sight (eggs included), those chances have been firmly reduced to 0%.
I'm absolutely delighted that I was among the less-than-half-of-the-population to have given birth, but I consider it to be good news that on this front at least, there is no risk of recurrence.
When I think of everybody in the world 1 in 2 seems mind boggling. Then I look round the room at the folk club, most of the members are over 60 and I think, really we do the NHS credit. Probably half of us are living with cancer, and living well. When the man who led the club died from lung cancer, we raised impressive sums for Cancer Research UK.
ReplyDelete