Off to see the Wizard

Statistics from Cancer Research UK tell us that the five-year survival rate for people with the same cancer and stage at diagnosis as mine is 54.4%

A sobering thought!

It is therefore very easy to slip into the trap of assuming that cancer has killed 45.6% of patients within five years, but this is not the case. Some patients have moved away, or simply not bothered to continue with monitoring, and some have died from other causes.

Most importantly, the statistic is a fact. It is a snapshot in time taken from a sample of people who do not include me. It is not, and should never be thought of as a probability.

In just the same way that if your first child is female, that has no bearing on the probability that your second child will be male. Fact.

Other statistics are available that indicate that the older one is when receiving a diagnosis reduces one's life expectancy. The same is true for healthy people (the longer one has lived, the less life one has remaining). And also, not surprisingly, the more recent one's diagnosis, the better one's prognosis, because treatments are becoming more effective all the time. It stands to reason that the data for five-year survival rates comes from people diagnosed more than five years ago.

It is now four years since my diagnosis and if I don't live for another full year it won't be because of that diagnosis. I continue to visit the wizard so that I can become a positive statistic.