The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,5

It’s very serious, but it’s not dire.” He went on to explain to me that he had successfully removed the tumor, but that he had found one “pea-size drop metastasis” to the peritoneum in the area above the bladder, literally a drop off the main tumor. I thought to myself, Okay that doesn’t sound that bad—a pea-size drop met that was also removed—so why was Josh so upset?

I lay there in my drugged state, letting their conversations wash over me as I worked myself to greater wakefulness. Dr. D.C. said that I wouldn’t remember anything that was being said that evening. Josh told him not to be so sure about that. I smiled to myself. Years of being with me had taught Josh that my mind is like a steel trap, and that, drugged or not, I don’t forget anything (especially when it’s something I can use against him).

I, in fact, remember a lot from that evening. In addition to the physical discomfort of having just come out of surgery, I remember thinking that the surgery must have taken way longer than the estimated two and a half hours, since it was dusk outside. I remember my brother and cousin coming to visit me in my hospital room. Most of all, though, I remember everyone throwing numbers about. One drop met. Stage IV. Six percent, 8 percent, 10 percent, 15 percent. Thirty-year-old numbers.

Because I had one metastatic spread of the main tumor to another part of my body, regardless of the size of that spread, I was thrown into the category of Stage IV. Stage IV colon cancer is associated with very low survival rates, ranging anywhere from 6 to 15 percent. Dr. D.C. repeatedly told Josh that evening that the statistics on survival rates are themselves based on thirty-year-old studies and therefore should not be relied upon.

Once I grasped that everyone was preoccupied with the numbers, I understood why Josh was so upset. Josh loves numbers. He can do complicated calculations in his head. He’d asked me at various points during our courtship, “What do you think the odds are of us getting married?” He’s memorized every Super Bowl score since the beginning of the Super Bowl. He can remember that Roger Federer was down 5–3 in the second set of the third round of Wimbledon in 2009. For him, as for many people, numbers impose order in an otherwise chaotic world of randomness. And to be told that his wife had Stage IV colon cancer and therefore possibly a single-digit likelihood of living five years was understandably and especially devastating.

Josh sobbed that night and early the next morning, as he googled again and again survival rates for Stage IV colon cancer from the recliner that was doubling as his bed. The light from the iPad cast an eerie glow on his face in the darkness of my hospital room. He didn’t want to discuss the statistics for fear that they would upset me, but Josh can never hide anything from me—that’s one of the reasons I love him so much.

And then he was incredulous when the numbers didn’t actually upset me. “So what?” I said. “Don’t you get it?” he demanded, wanting me to understand the seriousness of the situation.

As much as Josh loves me, he cannot comprehend a fundamental truth about me simply because he hasn’t lived my life. He doesn’t understand that my very existence on this planet is evidence of how little numbers matter to me. Numbers mean squat. I asked him that night to go back to 1976, into the desolation and hopelessness of Communist Vietnam, and set the odds of a blind girl making it out of that unimaginable poverty, of her escaping the stigma of having a physical deformity that would make her undesirable to any man and unworthy of being any child’s mother, and of her withstanding the shame of knowing that she would forever be the burden borne by a proud family that would have to care for her like an invalid for all her life.

I demanded that Josh set the odds of that little girl surviving at sea when so many grown men perished, of her gaining some sight despite years of optic nerve damage, of her achieving academic success in spite of the low family expectations stemming from immigrant ignorance, of her graduating from Harvard Law School, of her establishing a legal career at one of the most prominent international law firms in the world, and finally,