A cold and frosty November morning yesterday:
Bad enough to keep me inside until a quick Peppers Green Lane walk after lunch - followed by the now-inevitable post-exercise "fatigue" snooze. Then we had a kitchen crisis just as I was starting dinner - we have a complicated corner unit with sliding trays, and somehow the lower one fell off whatever is supposed to hold it in place. Getting it back beats me, and we have called in reinforcements (a helpful neighbour) for later in the week. I have a feeling it will need almost complete disassembly before it can be put together again.
I've been reflecting on the experience of an acquaintance who has recently had a brush with kidney cancer. Despite all we hear about cancer services being abandoned because of COVID-19, she was diagnosed and treated (surgery) within the space of a few months. She's lost half of one kidney, but they saved the other half. The surgery, and the recovery period, was tougher than advertised (not unusual, I think) but she has now been given the all-clear. No sign of cancer or the tumour to be found.
An excellent result, and I am of course very pleased for her. All over and done with in a few months, back to normal life (insofar as there is such a thing these days). One and a half kidneys is very nearly as good as two. That's the advantage of solid cancers - get them early enough and you have a good chance of getting rid of them altogether before they go metastatic and popping up all over the place. It's very different with a blood cancer like myeloma - there is just no way of getting rid of every trace of the cancer. Even the very powerful chemo drugs used before stem cell transplant (e.g. melphalan) always leave a few bad plasma cells behind, or some may make it through harvesting and then get returned to you later. That's why transplant is always followed by relapse, sooner or later. It's never 100%.
Being stuck with an incurable cancer that I know is going to be with me for life, even if in remission for as much of that time as possible, must be very different from being given the "all-clear" from a curable solid cancer. I don't have to worry about whether mine will come back again - I know it will, sooner or later. My acquaintance must have to live with a constant fear that it, or maybe another cancer, will come back. It's the Sword of Damocles. Which is the better - the chance of a bad outcome or the certainty of one? I really don't know.
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