I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ā80s and ā90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year ā palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away ā theyād cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or theyād pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then weād hear that they died.
And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.
It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city ā and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!
Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. Theyād stay in that city for 6-12 months and then theyād come home. We fully expected that they were still dying ā or theyād gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, weād think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didnāt stop ā two decades later they havenāt stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.
We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.
And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people donāt have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.
We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks ā into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.
Anyway, Iām preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle whatās happened in my lifetime.
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