The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,61
asked Josh why, if he’s afraid of flying, he likes to watch these shows. He tells me because they perversely make him feel better, reinforcing to him how many things must happen for an air disaster to occur, that in essence it’s the coalescing of a multitude of random and unlikely occurrences—the perfect storm.
Josh’s current obsession is with Air France Flight 447, a flight from Rio to Paris that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, killing all 228 people onboard. (He has forced me to watch the episode at least twenty times by now—the things you do for those you love…) A storm caused ice crystals to form in the plane’s pitot tubes, which in turn caused a temporary and what would ordinarily be a minor inconsistency and malfunction in the plane’s airspeed measurements, which in turn caused the autopilot to disconnect, which in turn forced two young and inexperienced copilots to take control of the plane. It just so happened that after a night of partying in Rio with his girlfriend and on little sleep, the seasoned captain had chosen only moments earlier to go for his scheduled and authorized nap. The two copilots panicked in response to the erroneous readings of slowed airspeed, instinctively pushing the airplane’s nose up (which is the opposite of what should be done), causing an actual and sustained decrease in airspeed and then an engine stall.
While the odds of that plane crashing were at some point as insignificant as those of any other plane crashing, events transpired that increased those odds. When those young copilots were assigned to Flight 447, the odds grew. When the captain chose to go out the night before, the odds grew even more. When weather patterns changed and forced the airplane to fly through a storm, the odds grew to an insurmountable level.
Similarly, while the odds of Josh and me meeting might have been 0 percent at the moment of his birth, they changed over time. They increased when Vietnam revised its policy to permit those of ethnic Chinese ancestry to leave the country. They increased again when I made it to the refugee camps in Hong Kong. They increased dramatically when I set foot on American soil, and then again when I gained sight. They continued to increase as I chose to excel academically, as I ventured into uncharted territory by heading to the Northeast for college, as I stayed in New York after law school, as I chose to start my legal career at Cleary Gottlieb. They increased when Josh chose to be a tax lawyer, to do what very few from his community did and come to New York to practice the most exciting and challenging type of tax law, when he chose to accept a job offer at Cleary Gottlieb.
Numbers are not static. They are constantly changing, going up or down by degrees. Everyone agrees that with the outcome of my exploratory surgery, my odds of survival have increased. By how much? It’s impossible to say. Josh has always told me that, much like the coming together of various random forces to cause an unlikely plane crash to occur or an unlikely pair like us to meet, in order for me to beat cancer, a series of things have to happen, like the falling of a row of dominoes.
Dr. D.L. agrees with Josh’s view. Josh has told me from the beginning, “We need certain things to go our way.” I needed to respond well to chemotherapy. I needed my CEA to be a reliable marker so as to warn me and my medical team about probable undetectable disease. I needed to have access to the best HIPEC surgeon possible. I needed to make some good decisions about if and when to undergo HIPEC and exploratory surgery. The disease in my peritoneum needed to respond to HIPEC. I needed an exploratory surgery to show no visible disease. All of those things happened. And then I had to find out that the “washings” tested negative for microscopic disease.
Of all that has gone right thus far, I’ve had very little control over anything. In general, beating cancer is about facts, circumstances, and occurrences that are uncontrollable (i.e., the extent of disease at diagnosis, access to health insurance and financial resources, capacity to understand and process medical information, emotional stamina, and most important of all, how a cancer’s unique biology responds or doesn’t respond to treatment).