Reflections on This Week's News

We know this week's revelation came as a shock to most of you. It did to us as well. But really, all that has changed is the timeline.

Out of respect for those who weren't ready to hear the baser details, we never put into bold black and white what we have known all along about the prognosis: the odds were stacked against me from the very beginning. Those of you curious and brave enough to look up the survival statistics discovered, as we did, that women with Stage IV endometrial cancer have an 80% chance of dying of their disease within five years of diagnosis.

One always hopes to beat the statistics, of course. "Someone has to be in that 20%" was a phrase oft uttered or heard over the last months. We would go over the reasons why it might be me: young, otherwise healthy, eat a good diet, had an extensive surgery to clear out visible and palpable disease. But the plain fact of the matter is it is far more likely one will be in the 80% than the 20%, and whatever hope lay in the gut was always tempered by the knowledge that lay in the brain. Once a scientist, always a scientist.

Since my diagnosis in May, one of the things I've been working on -- part of the healing process, if you will -- is adjusting mentally to the idea that my lifespan would likely be measured not in decades, but in years. In retrospect, I realize that I focused on the most hopeful option left to me: I pretty much expected to live out those five years before succumbing. After doing some more reading, I don't think even that was very realistic.

At this point, years is the hopeful option, and indeed, is something we hope for.

But just in case, I'm starting the adjustment process all over again, with months as the new unit of measurement. Better to be pleasantly surprised than painfully so.

What I'm trying to say is that in a particular way, this week's news may not be as wrenching for us as it probably is for you. We had a chance to prepare for it; we have known all along it was a possibility. It just isn't what we wanted or hoped for. We really, really wanted a remission after the chemo, preferably a very long remission. But a cure? We always knew that wasn't in the cards.

We wonder now if we should have been more forthright from the beginning. Would that help you now to absorb the news? The plain bald (but getting fuzzier!) fact is that this is terribly hard news to absorb, because we just don't want it to be so.