worried about cancer spreading – please advise

I found this website after looking at a short bio of Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who dies a few years back of lung cancer but after surviving adenocarcinoma for over twenty years. He has Patricia’s attitude: the statistics are numbers in the aggregate. They don’t apply to INDIVIDUALS. Look up Gould in Wikipedia and you will find a reference to his article on the subject.

I agree that you certainly don’t need all this negativity from the doctor. My husband is very much against knowing the statistics of this case. He takes the view that he is an individual and not a statistic. when we saw the oncologist this week I asked my husband -Do you to know the difference between survival rates with or without chemo? and he said No.

I have read that when there is a resection there is often follow-up treatment of chemo to make sure that the wound margins are completely free of any residues of the disease.

Several things I have found helpful:

The current view is the no cancer is cureable, the objective is to manage it so that the individual can live a relatively normal life. In that respect it is like AIDS. no -one recovers but many people live ‘normal’ lives and keep the disease under control. All of us know people who are living with cancer and in fact everyday on the street we pass people who are living with the disease and don’t even know it.

Secondly if the survival rate is from x to y on average that means that some people will be on the extremes. Some people will die withing days/weeks of diagnosis and others will live way beyond the upper limit. That’s the nature of averages. We believe that by taking a strong active approach, my husband can be on the upper end of the average and we are working in our lives to achieve that.

I can strongly recommend a book by Rosy Daniel who used to be the head of the Bristol Cancer Centre; it’s called the Cancer Directory. She sets out all the resources that are available within the UK, both orthodox and complementary. She places great emphasis on ‘health creation’ once the orthodox medics have completed their job, e.g. counselling, nutritition, relaxation etc and we are now starting down this route.

The most important thing is to be in control and not feel you and your dad are at the mercy of others; take control & take responsibility – that alone is a step in the right direction. Ask for another opinion, your GP will refer you to another doctor if you ask.

What I have found is that we have experienced ups and downs but we try throughout to see it as our responsibility. When we heard the info about the chemo my husband’s response was – ‘Well that confirms what we thought, we have to beat this ourselves!’

To paraphrase a poster my daughter used to have on her bedroom door (My room, my mess, my business!)
MY CANCER, MY BODY, MY BUSINESS

All the best to you and your father,
Patricia