Strength takes many forms, some appearing vicious and some benign; some soft and malleable, some hard and inflexible. The only way to know whether an attribute is a strength or a weakness is to examine its context. Even then, appearances can be deceptive. Tears at a funeral may suggest weakness, but mean something entirely different. A frail man attempting to protect an abused child from undeserved blows may be strong in intent, but weak in execution. Which is he, then? Like so many other people in so many diverse situations, he is neither weak nor strong; but he may be both. And that begs the question: does strength or weakness define us? Should it?
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Lung cancer, according to Livescience.com, has a five-year survival rate of 26.7%, but when detected early, the five-year survival rate for non-small cell lung cancer (which is the kind I have) can be as high as 65%. I beat both measures—at least for the first diagnosis. It has been more than six years since my first diagnosis. It’s been just over a year since the recurrence was detected. The median survival time after a recurrence of lung cancer, according to data published by the National Library of Medicine, is roughly 21 months. Assuming my situation follows the median, I have about 8 months left. It’s a morbid calculation, I realize, but I imagine “how much time do I have left” is a fairly typical question for people to ponder. The problem with asking the question, though, is that the answer might tend to lead the patient to “give up” on efforts to go into remission because, “it’s just a matter of time.” Ach! I do not intend to give up, but the extent to which I might be willing to suffer through the stages of deterioration probably has limits.
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Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see a dark grey background upon which literally billions of nearly microscopic images are briefly displayed. Yesterday, it occurred to me that those tiny images, collectively, are like individual pages of a book that, if sufficiently enlarged, contain all the information I have ever absorbed. We may think we have forgotten things, never to recover them, but our brains hold them in deeply hidden memory! Every page of every book we’ve ever read. Every conversation in which we have ever been involved. Every film we have ever seen. Every email we’ve ever sent or received. Every image our eyes have every beheld. It’s a fascinating thought, I think; to imagine that every experience we’ve ever had remains stored inside our bodies. If that is, indeed, the case, there must be a way to retrieve it. Sadly, we have had thousands and thousands of years, as a species, to find the key…to no avail. It may take thousands and thousands of more years to begin the search, in earnest.
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Time to get ready for my visit to the oncology crowd…a blood draw to measure exactly where my magnesium levels are this morning. Oh, boy!
