since cancer isn't a death sentence

....I think our way of thinking about it needs to undergo a major sea-shift.

Of all the various diagnoses out there, cancer is the one that always makes people panic. We've gotten it into our psyches--irrationally, I think--that cancer is the end.

But it really isn't. So much has changed in just the last five years. If I'd gotten my brain tumor five years ago, well, sure--the statistical chances of surviving very long were not so good (although as I've said before, even then people did survive). With the new kinds of chemo and radiation available now, though, it's a completely different ballgame. We all need to realize that nowadays a diagnosis of cancer may simply mean some hideously unpleasant months up ahead.

And unpleasantness isn't necessarily the end of the world.

Because--and I can't stress this enough--attitude and your own belief that you're going survive count for a lot. This is why it's so important that doctors NOT tell someone they've got a "terminal case." Among other things, they just don't know. I don't think I would have minded being told what the statistics were--as long as those statistics were balanced by information on all the new techniques now available. But I very much mind that someone took it upon himself to transform a set of statistics into predictions. Because how can you make predictions about anyone? There are too many variables. I'm sure it's highly unlikely that, when I take my walk up the hill to the health food store this afternoon, someone will not be watching and will drive up onto the sidewalk and flatten me into a pancake. But heck, that happens, too, and probably at about the same rate of probability as my chances were of developing a brain tumor: one in a hundred thousand. If I walk up that hill one hundred thousand times, there's probably a statistical likelihood that I'll get hit by a car at some point.

Yet knowing that doesn't stop me from doing it. And why should it?

So given arbitrariness of the statistics and the vast amount of unquantifiables involved in each individual case, it's best, I think, for us to all rethink what it is that cancer means. Cancer is just another disease, like the hundreds of others we all get and suffer through. And what we look like on the other side of this new experience depends as much on our attitude and approach as on anything else.

Because really, cancer is no more terminal than life in general. In which case, haven't we all got terminal cases?