When we first learned of my wife's breast cancer diagnosis more than three years ago now, I immediately began a quest to become an expert layman of breast cancer. For me, knowledge is understanding, and understanding is, well, something I can at least use to assemble what I'm dealing with and work with it. My wife's not necessarily the same way, and I became sort of the resource person for her, though she also does her own reading about breast cancer too.
One of the scariest things I read were the survival statistics about non-progression of the disease and life expectancy. Ugh. What dire things to read about. But I quickly learned that survival stats are something that's really irrelevant. If anyone would ask me now I'd say they are rubbish and something you should pay no attention to, not out of ignorance, but because they aren't predictors of your individual situation. Survival rates are based on data collected over 5, 10, or more years. They are summarized and generalized. Plus, breast cancer drugs and treatments have matured and changed drastically year after year, more or less, 10 years ago.
My wife's treatment didn't even exist six or so months prior to her breast cancer diagnosis. So what do survival rates from 10 years have to do with today, and how do you know where you'll be within the bell curve of results? I quickly learned that statistics have very little to do with your individual situation. She proved the numbers wrong within three months of starting her treatments, blowing away the study results that the drugs would only slow or stop the progression, not shrink and later eliminate the tumor within 6 months as happened in her case.
Did everyone else on the same treatment plan have the same miraculous results as my wife? Nope. She was near the far end of the spectrum of positive results from the treatment. And nobody really knows why, she just did. She's special (like I didn't know that already.) And we're thankful for that every day.
You and your wife aren't a statistic, you're an individual situation with individual results. I say, ignore the statistics, and throw out the survival rate junk. Become your own success story, whether it is a series of small, up-and-down steps towards progress, or you're fortunate enough to live life for a while without evidence of the cancer.
You were probably never that good at math anyway. :)
