(December 2007) Benjamin Franklin was wrong.“In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.” There’s nothing certain about death. I can prove this. Ask a doctor to tell you when you are going to die. You can even let the doctor off the hook. Say you want to know not when, but whether you are going to die.
What you’ll get is a lot of hemming and hawing. I was told I have leukemia. The Internet ventured the opinion that my life expectancy would be about seven years. I saw this as an invitation to quit the job, tee up a Titleist and never look back. But, I thought maybe I should get an opinion from someone who had actually met me.
So I asked my doctor, one of the foremost CLL researchers in the world.
“Every case is different,” I was told.
“Yeah, but.”
“There’s really no way to know. We’re seeing very good results with new treatment protocols. We have patients now who could go to any doctor in the world and they wouldn’t find a single indication they have CLL.”
“Am I likely to be one of those patients?”
“Every case is different.”
Maybe so, but if you’ve had three patients you have an average. So what’s the truth? The truth is that so far uncertainty is the worst thing about having chronic lymphocytic leukemia. And like the cancer itself, the uncertainty pervades everything.
First there’s the big question. We’ve already got the no-answer answer to the direct question, so I approached the subject from a different direction. “What do you think of 401(k) accounts for a guy like me?” No luck.
It’s a curious thing really. None of us knows what’s going to happen—how long we’re going to live, whether we’ll be happy or successful or happy and successful. Yet as soon as someone says “you have cancer” you expect answers. There just aren’t any. At least not in my case there aren’t. Every case is different.
Then you realize the uncertainty just begins with the diagnosis. When I reached Stage IV and it came time to talk about treatments, there were several options. Each was explained in somewhat rapid fire polysyllabic detail. And then, for a change I was asked a question. “Which one do you want?” I was, well, uncertain.
We went home to read through all the paperwork, the protocols, the clinical trial release forms, the patients’ bill of rights and on and on. The potential side effects of each option ranged from hangnails to death. We concluded we couldn’t know. So I wrote an e-mail to the doctor. “I’ve produced TV news programs most of my life,” I wrote. “That gives me the ability to do a lot of things simultaneously—write short declarative sentences, drink copious amounts of coffee, count backwards from sixty—but it doesn’t prepare me to make decisions on cancer treatments. So, let’s do this. You sit in the chair over here and I’ll sit on your funny little stool with chrome legs and wheels, and you tell me what you would do.”
He called and told me what to do. Now we were getting somewhere. He also told me why. I felt a lot better. I signed up for a clinical trial – FCR my doctor called it, partially because he has an acronym for almost everything and partially because FCR is a hell of a lot easier than having to say Fludarabine, Cyclophosphamide, Rituximab several times in the same conversation. Essentially, it’s two traditional chemotherapy drugs and a human antibody. The trial dealt with the dosage of the antibody. By luck of the draw, I got the 1000 mg dosage, not the 500 mgs. Is 1000 better? That’s what they’re trying to find out. Right now they’re—let’s all say it together--uncertain. I guess there’s no real point to wanting all these answers. It wouldn’t change anything if I knew in advance that I was going to get sick. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I’d still get sick. I didn’t do anything to bring this on, and other than try to stay generally healthy, there’s nothing I can do about it. And as much as I thought I wanted to know how much time I have, the truth is, I don’t want to know. What good would it do, really? It might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Get out the calendar and mark the days. When the calendar runs out, so do you. That’s no way to live. That’s not even a good way to die. Living is about living, it shouldn’t be about waiting to die. The lesson is to take it as it comes and keep looking forward, expecting to live. It’s what we do. It shouldn’t be any different for those who seem to have something standing in the way. Go until you can’t go any more, without expecting to ever have to stop. I’m certain of that.
