Phyllis, PJ Hamel you are giving this HER2+ve gal a new hope...:)
I was all depressed this noon after reading HER2+ve stats..and that is with Herceptin...gonna visit my surgeon tomm...first meeting after diagnosis...Phyllis your article woll make understading all those percentages a lot easier..:)
As a Her2 + inflammatory breast cancer patient, all of the stats in my situation were grim. Here's one of my early shareposts on coping with unfavorable stats. It focuses on how to deal emotionally with stats that aren't in your favor. As you talk to your surgeon, keep in mind that you are not your disease. Herceptin has saved many lives, and there is every reason to assume at this point that you can be in that surviving group.
Thank you Phyllis.
I wish I had read your article after my diagnosis. Many are the nights I lay awake going over statistics in my mind, haunted by the cold numbers.
But really stats are just numbers, and each of us is, as you so wisely state, unique.
Here is a poem I wrote about it:
I want to move on,
to not feel trapped,
in the husk of a cancer patient,
listening,
to cells grow
in case they mutate,
hearing only,
the sound of statistics
echoing in my bones.
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Thanks, Phyllis, this is an excellent summary of what statistics REALLY mean, and how to look at them. So many of us say, "I'll do anything, go through any treatment, to lower my risk of recurrence." But is a prophylactic double mastectomy worth reducing your risk or recurrence from, say, 12% to 6%? Sure, that's a 50% reduction... but the risk was already very low. If the oncologist says "the 5-year survival rate for women with your diagnosis, statistically speaking, is 80%" - do you grab onto that 20% and assume you'll be in it? Or do you say, "YEAH, there's a 4 in 5 chance my cancer won't come back"? The key to a lot of this statistical information is the filter through which each of us sees it. PJH
I agree with you 100% (to use a statistical term
) that the key to coping with numbers is to concentrate on the group that lives. In my case more than 60% of patients with a similar diagnosis died within five years. So I had to mentally focus on the 40% who lived. Since I'm a humanities person, not a math person, it didn't take me long to do some rounding up. "Well", I told myself, "that's almost half. I have just as good a chance to live as to die."
I'm so glad you're in that 40%!!! PJ