2015

My older brother and me, 1976 style

When I was a kid, I remember very clearly sitting with my older brother playing with our Mickey and Minnie Mouse bicentennial spark-making toys--"friction sparklers," the kind of toys we played with in the 70's, probably while smoking our candy cigarettes and rolling around unbuckled in the back of someone's station wagon, because apparently child safety hadn't been invented yet back then--and talking about how old we'd be in the year 2000.

As a 6 year old, being 30, which I was in 1999, seemed impossibly old.  Old in the way that was unimaginable back then and did not truly even feel attainable.  Me, 30?  And here I am already 45.

And thinking on it, our 2000 lives really were unimaginable to us the way we lived in 1976.  Microwaves were new and amazing, as were 4 function calculators.  Color TVs were rare and there was no such thing as TV remotes or VCRs, much less DVDs or Blueray. Computers, video games, digital cameras, cell phones, the internet were all strictly sci-fi creations.  There was really no way we could have made that mental leap from 1976 to 2000 without so very many things that happened in the intervening years, all the different steps that brought us from one time to the other.

And now we're in 2015.

I started writing this post thinking about everything that's happened in 2014.  I didn't know I was stage iv this time last year, so in addition to all the things that have happened outside of medical issues, there have been some crazy big medical things to wrap my head around in the past year.  I feel victorious sitting here in 2015, I struggle with doubts, but I know I'm very lucky right now.  There were times in 2014 when I was worried about it, whether I'd be here, what shape I'd be in if I was. But I am here, and I feel really good.

But the thing that's come to me as I write this, thinking of me in 1976 thinking about 2000 and how we had no idea at all about all the crazy innovations that, for better or worse, have changed our lives so profoundly.

I have no reason to believe that the same won't be true in the coming years when we look back at 2015.

There have been a lot of promising things going on in cancer research.  Palbociclib is almost to the market and I recently heard about another new drug called Pictilisib that's showing interesting results in cancers like mine. At a stage iv conference I attended last October I heard about all kinds of other pathways that researchers are trying to disrupt to stop cancer from growing.  A lot of these things won't work out, of course, but I hope some will.

While I was a busy 6 year old in 1976, playing with choking hazards and  setting off sparks around flammables with bicentennial Mickey and Minnie, all the drugs I've taken since 2012, the treatment regimes and knowledge, the ways to manage side effects, none of this was even close to reality back then.

And now people keep saying we're right on the edge of a real sea change in how cancer is treated and the life saving possibilities.  Maybe that's partly fundraising talk, a means to entice donors to support this research or the other, but the world is constantly changing and the unimaginable becomes normal at an astonishing rate.

I sometimes find myself feeling nostalgic for the way things used to be in the world when I was a kid.  I miss a lot of the good things about the way life was for us in the 1970's.  I think about my brother and me running through sprinklers or playing with the garden hose on hot summer days.  I remember sitting out with my grandparents every evening after supper all summer long, just enjoying the cool air and me listening to the grownups shoot the breeze. I remember roaming through the woods for hours on end pretending to be all sorts of things from pioneers to explorers to circus stars to crooks.  There were a lot of sad things about my life in those days, but there are so many sweet memories, too.

But if I look beyond my nostalgia, I recognize that in many ways our lives really are better now: in the tools of our daily lives, in child safety, and (importantly for me) in cancer treatments.  My hope is that in the next few years we look back at 2015 and marvel at how much progress we've made.