The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,6
of her marrying a handsome, brilliant man from the American South and then having two beautiful daughters with him. Of course, Josh couldn’t set those odds.
Josh has spent many hours reading medical studies, trying to increase the likelihood of my survival. A single metastatic spread as opposed to multiple metastatic spreads yields some additional percentage points, as do my age and level of fitness, as does the fact that I have access to the best medical care in the world, as does the fact that I have a wonderful support system. According to Josh, these raise my odds of living five years to somewhere in the vicinity of 60 percent, which is to him a hell of a lot better than 6 percent.
To be honest, 60 percent doesn’t sound that great to me, either. In truth, anything short of 100 percent is insufficient. But as we all know, nothing in life is 100 percent. The chance of a woman under forty having colon cancer is 0.08 percent according to a Mayo Clinic publication—Josh tells me this sort of thing because I personally don’t google anything to do with statistics. That number takes into account women being afflicted with the disease for both genetic and nongenetic reasons. My tumor showed no genetic markers, which means that the likelihood of me having colon cancer is even less than 0.08 percent. My phenomenal internist told me that in his thirty-seven years of practice he has never come across a case where someone as young as I developed colon cancer for nongenetic reasons. Don’t I feel so special? I had at least a 99.92 percent chance of not developing colon cancer at this point in my life, and I got it.
So numbers mean nothing. They neither provide assurance nor serve as a source of aggravation. Sure, it would have been better if my cancer were Stage I and there had been zero metastatic spread, but even when the odds are in your favor, you can still lose. For all of Josh’s obsessiveness with statistical odds, he always tells me when the underdog wins the football or basketball game and defies the odds, “That’s why we have to play the games.”
Well, I’m here to play the game, and I choose not to live and die by what the oddsmakers say. I choose not to put faith in percentages that were assembled by some anonymous researcher looking at a bunch of impersonal data points. Instead, I choose to put faith in me, in my body, mind, and spirit, in those parts of me that are already so practiced in the art of defying the odds. Coach Taylor always told his ragtag Dillon High School Panther football team on Friday Night Lights, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!”
I have clear eyes and a full heart.
4
Seeing Ghosts
In the first twenty-four hours after my diagnosis, every time I thought about my children, my body would be racked with sobs unrelenting. I had often speculated about the types of women my girls would become one day. The thought of not being there to see whether Mia would indeed grow into a bright, sensitive, aloof beauty and Belle into a gregarious, charismatic spitfire made my already pained stomach hurt even more and my heart ache as nothing else I had ever experienced. The image of them crying inconsolably and in futility for me, for me to lie with them at night and kiss their boo-boos away, for someone—anyone—to love them as much and as well as I, tore my insides into a million ragged pieces.
So, for my own self-preservation, I stopped thinking about them. I told Josh to not bring them to the hospital, and when he did anyway, I kept those few visits very short. Invariably, they were unpleasant events, with Mia rushing to leave minutes after arriving because she was no doubt frightened by the tubes coming out of Mommy and with Belle being forcibly removed from my room as we were all subjected to her heart-wrenching screams. My babies became someone else’s children. I knew that they were being well cared for by my parents and sister and entertained by an army of relatives. That was enough for me. I had nothing to give them during those days I spent in the hospital, as I continued to reel from the shock of the diagnosis and worked to get myself ready for and then recover from surgery.