Anna:  Mummy, I think it would be good if Daddy married another wife and I could have TWO mummies.

Me:  Two mummies?  Why would you want to have two mummies?

Anna:  You could be the mummy WITH cancer, and you could stay in bed all day, and not do any work.  Then I could have a mummy WITHOUT cancer, and she could do the dishes and the laundry and play with me.

Me:  I’d rather be the mummy without cancer.

 

A couple of days ago I really needed to be alone.  By the ocean.  In the sun.  Nathan had been home sick all week, and it had been a very difficult couple of days: stressful, listening to his cough, and feeling like it was my fault he was sick.  And I needed to be alone, to think, and to wonder.

Now that I can begin to see the end of all things, I’ve begun to wonder again.  What about the future?  What about the cancer?  While I was having chemo the other day, I picked up a book from the shelf behind me: The Complete Guide to Colorectal Cancer.  I flipped to the chapter entitled “Life After Cancer.”  The first thing I read was rather startling: it turns out that there isn’t any – life after cancer, that is.  Some sort of freaky, scary statistic leapt out at me:  even after five years cancer-free, many people still succumb to colorectal cancer.  I closed the book, put it back on the shelf.  ”I don’t think I can read this right now,”  I whispered to Laurie.  She nodded.

But  on Thursday, when I had my dressing changed, I decided that I DID need to read it.  I’ve done pitifully little reading about this disease, and I need to know a few things.  But this time I picked up a different book:  The Intelligent Patient Guide to Colorectal Cancer.  Not that I am – intelligent, that is – I just hoped it might have a different statistic, a different take on  the future.

Here are some things I read.  Let me note that the sun was no longer shining down by the ocean.  An icy wind had blown up, and dark rain clouds threatened overhead.  In fiction, it is a device known as pathetic fallacy, whereby the events in nature reflect the happenings in the plot.

* 1 in 15 Canadians will get colorectal cancer at some point in their lifetime, and 1 in 28 will die of it.

*  patients who have had one colorectal cancer are at increased risk of developing another one.

*  colorectal cancer will recur in 50% of patients who have been treated for cure.

*  if a colon or rectal cancer is going to recur, either locally (in the area of the original cancer) or as a metastases elsewhere in the body, most often it will do so in the first two years after surgery.

*  more than 75% of all recurrences will make themselves known during the first 24 months after surgery.

*  the majority of patients who develop a recurrence of colon or rectal cancer cannot be cured of it.

 

So there you have it: twenty-four months.  That’s the magic number.  I had thought, that if I DID happen to develop another cancer , it would be years and years down the road.  At 44 years old, I figured that I might have another 40 years in me, and that if cancer came again, it would be much much later in life, when I wouldn’t mind shuffling off this mortal coil.  But twenty-four months.  Yipes.

I’m glad to know what I know.  I do not feel that my future is blighted, and that I’m sure to die of this disease.  But I am rather startled.  I know that Dr. Fitz in Victoria probably told me all these statistics, but I’m not very good at listening to numbers.  I never thought I’d be one of these numbers.  And one can only absorb so much at a time.

But when the rain finally came, suffice it to say that by then there wasn’t much left of my mascara to run down my cheeks.  

It had already been washed away.

So much depends

Upon a red wheel barrow

Glazed with rain water

Beside the white chickens

                         – e.e. cummings