7 months (or the natural history of breast cancer)

Cancer, chemo, and chocolate chip cookies

I read something interesting this morning.  I was searching for a chart I had seen a while ago and came across an article that included data I hadn't seen before about the "natural history of untreated breast cancer," which, at least in this context, means what happens if you just leave the cancer to do what it does and don't try and stop it.  I guess I don't really need to tell you, but, as it turns out, things don't go well when you do that.

For very obvious reasons, the patients studied for this were diagnosed between 1805 and 1933.  It basically looks at women who had breast cancer before there were treatments for breast cancer.

(On a related note, be aware that the article itself is over 10 years old and a lot has changed in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer in the intervening decade, so I wouldn't actually recommend reading too much into the facts and figures quoted in the rest of the article any more than I would recommend going right now to Blockbusters so you can rent that great new movie Moulin Rouge! on VHS to keep you busy while waiting for book 5 of the Harry Potter series to come out.  Especially because the stats reported on in the article were from a time when Tupac was alive and Friends was a new show on TV.)

But anyway, I had read some time ago that untreated breast cancer patients had a median survival of about 2.5 years from the time the lump was discovered to eventual death.  Turns out it's actually 2.7 years and this article reports some more figures I didn't know before, including that women with untreated grade 3 breast cancer (the faster growing kind that mine is) lived a median of 22 months--that is, half of them died in less time and half of them survived past that point.  Also, not one of the untreated grade 3 patients was alive 5 years later.

So, I am very happy to report that 22 months from finding the lumps, for me, was last February and, I can assure you, I am still alive.  Go science.  Better living--and just plain being alive--through chemistry is at work in my life.

February, you know, was winter, spring, summer, and newly fall crisp days ago.  Also 41 blog posts of varying degrees of stress, hope, resignation, and silver-lining-searching ago (wouldn't you know it, exactly, to the very day, 22 months after my first biopsy that confirmed my stage III grade 3 cancer, I posted this stressed out little post about my impending stage IV diagnosis.  Which, quite frankly, while a difficult and unpleasant time, was still better than being the day I died.)  And, it was also lots of nice, normal, going about life days ago--which is kind of a miracle given what would have been going on (or not going on) had I been born roughly 80 years before I was.

I have more scans coming up next month that will give us a better idea of what's happening now, but at the moment I feel really good.  And happy.  And definitely not 7 months in the grave.  And for that, and every single anything I've done over the past 7 months (including the stupid things like mopping the floors and playing Plants vs. Zombies, and also the fun things like vacation days, birthday parties, and dying parts of my daughter's and her friend's hair blue, because it all works together to make up a life), I need to thank my surgeons, oncologists, and all the people who brought us some really spiffy advancements in chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and hormonal therapy.

What have you done in the past 7 months that you're glad you didn't miss?